1 July 2013

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

Server software upgrade completed

Over the last week we've been upgrading the wiki from MediaWiki 1.19.2 to 1.21.1, the server operating system from Debian 6 to 7 and the web server from Apache to Nginx. One reason for the move is the recent interest in Perfect forward secrecy (PFS) coming from articles such as this. PFS is an obscure feature of SSL/TLS and requires at least OpenSSL version 1 which is included in Debian 7 but not in version 6. Also a more recent version of Apache than is packaged in Debian 7 is required, but Nginx has supported PFS for quite some time now.

In addition to supporting PFS, Nginx is by all accounts much more efficient than Apache as it uses an asynchronous event-driven approach to handling requests, instead of the Apache threaded or process-oriented approach. Also Nginx's event-driven approach can provide more predictable performance under high loads, thus their slogan; get async or get sunk!