Configuring an email server to not get flagged as spam sender is no small feat, but these small tweaks will help your email server cross the hump. It’s not a complete configuration guide for sendmail but a collection of few healthy tweaks that should put your email server in better light when viewed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.

Informatica Cloud Mobile 2.0 is now live at iTunes Store. Informatica Cloud Mobile enables you to remotely monitor your Informatica Cloud jobs and take action on them from any place, at any time using your iPhone or iPad. Informatica Cloud Mobile works with all Informatica Cloud editions: Informatica Cloud Basic, Standard, Enterprise and Express. This is a complete revamp of the mobile app and mirrors the new design direction for Informatica Products. The design is also in-sync with iOS 7 updates and looks like the whole world is going flat and gray. Hey, at least the dots in the logo use primary colors and we do have red/yellow/green status icons. It’s been a couple of years since we last heard about native versus HTML5 for mobile apps. Note, in this case when I say HTML5 it implies the rendering is done using UIWebView, but the actual CSS and JavaScript is packaged within the app and most of the HTML is dynamically generated in JavaScript or Objective C. So it’s not a website that can be viewed from within an app.

Ghost is a clean blogging only software with minimalistic design aesthetics and responsive web design. It comes with pretty decent functionality out of the box and its themes can be extended easily using handlebars. The bhira.net blog is running on Ghost.js and I wrote this post as a recollection of the steps I followed in setting up this server. This post describes how to setup Ghost.js blogging software on a CentOS server. These instructions are meant for a production server and will use MySQL for storage and run nodejs using pm2 (process manager for Node). Nginx is used as a proxy server for nodejs.

This is an update to the original post for setting up Apache, PHP on CentOS. Last year has been great and there is an abundance of vendors providing VPS on the cheap. My goto website for checking the latest on VPS vendors is www.lowendbox.com . For this post I went with a tiny 128MB VPS from www.ramnode.com . This server setup is for Cent OS 6.x with Nginx + PHP-FPM + MySQL. It describes how to setup a VPS (virtual private server) to run Nginx, PHP and MySQL on CentOS. The VPS uses a tiny amount of memory (total server memory is 128MB) and is running on CentOS 6.x. The intent is to setup a fully functional server that has been secured using iptables and configured to use Nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL for production. It uses CentOS services to manage all the applications and is configured to use log rotation.

This post is an attempt to document end-to-end the process of getting and installing SSL certificate on nginx server. The actual installation is pretty straight forward, its the getting the certificate part which usually trips most first time users. In this post I’m specifically referring to the filenames as used by Comodo SSL Certificate, but in the past I’ve used PositiveSSL certificate which is also issued by Comodo but has a slightly different trust chain. In general, shorter trust chains are better and will result in better performance. For a cheap certificate that cost $9/year PositiveSSL has a short trust chain of depth 3, that’s hard to beat.

Whenever you get a new RedHat or CentOS instance you want to secure it by setting up firewall rules using the builtin in iptables. If you spinoff an Amazon EC2 instance then you’d be doing the equivalent using Security Groups, which are a slightly higher level concept but essentially performs the same function. If running a VPS on barebones CentOS, iptables is the easiest option. Its easy to lock yourself out of the system if you make a mistake when configuring iptables. I prefer writing all the rules in a script file, double checking the commands to make sure I’m not closing SSH on port 22. Also, its a good idea to remain logged in the current SSH shell after executing iptables rules and then attempt to login in a new SSH shell to ensure you still have access to the server.

This post describes how to setup a nameserver on CentOS. The setup is intended to service DNS (domain name system) queries for this server itself. The nameserver is generic and can be used to provide DNS lookup for other websites as well, but the original intention of the post was to setup a fully contained server which services its own DNS queries. Since this original post I’ve started using Amazon Route53 which provides a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

Here is a list of commonly used Perforce commands when dealing with branches. They are by no means comprehensive, but are intended as a quick reminder.

Salesmobl iPhone App has been released. Salesmobl provides mobile access to Salesforce Accounts, Contacts, Events, Leads, Opportunities, and custom objects. Make one touch phone calls, send emails, log calls/emails in Salesforce and sync iPhone Contacts and Calendars with Salesforce. More details at Salesmobl site and you can view demo video on YouTube.

This post describes how to setup a VPS (virtual private server) to run Apache, PHP and MySQL on CentOS. Usually I configure only the LAMP stack on dev servers, but I had to go through some additional configuration when setting up a production web server with Apache + MySQL + PHP5 on CentOS 5.8 running on VPS. VPS servers are pretty cheap and the best way is to start with a bare bones server running CentOS 5.8 and then you can configure only the things you need. This gives you complete control on what runs on the server, but then you need to setup DNS nameserver and iptables firewall. This VPS instance uses a tiny amount of memory (total server memory is 128MB) and is running on CentOS 5.8. The intent is to setup a fully functional server that runs DNS nameserver, is secured using iptables and configured to use Apache Httpd, PHP5 and MySQL for production use. It uses CentOS services to manage all the applications and is configured to use log rotation.