Shamlessly grep’d from the http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ There be good stuff here… I’ve started attending a social group of bloggers. It’s part of my mandated community outreach ordered by she-who-must-be-obeyed. (“You need to get out of the office more than once a week!”) The group is primarily a bunch of people who are looking to use their…

Shamlessly grep’d from the http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ There be good stuff here… I’m not an electrician. While I am pretty confident that I can change a light bulb or plug something into an outlet, adding a new electrical outlet or installing a new light into the ceiling of my office is beyond my skill set. Much of…

Shamlessly grep’d from the http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ There be good stuff here… Security is a measurement of risk. Nothing is ever secure, but things can be made secure enough. Most of the time, online network attacks are not personal. The attacker does not want “your site” as much as they want “a” site and yours just happened…

Shamlessly grep’d from the http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/ There be good stuff here… In my last three entries about minimal web server security, I covered security by obscurity methods to deter a blind attacker and very basic methods to prevent unintentional information disclosure by blocking open directory browsing. The best solution to prevent open directory browsing is simply…

The find utility on linux allows you to pass in a bunch of interesting arguments, including one to execute another command on each file. We’ll use this in order to figure out what files are older than a certain number of days, and then use the rm command to delete them. Command Syntax find /path/to/files*…

From Yahoo answers So you’ve got MySQL on your web server, but it’s only opened to local ports by default for security reasons. If you want to access your database from a client tool like the MySQL Query Browser, normally you’d have to open up access from your local IP address… but that’s not nearly…

When you check the email relayers option within WHM then it shows empty. You can try the following change on your server. Using pico or vim pico /etc/passwd and search for the following entry. mailnull:x:47:47::/var/spool/mqueue:/sbin/nologin Change it to mailnull:x:47:12::/var/spool/mqueue:/sbin/nologin Restart the eximstats on the server, /scripts/restartsrv_eximstats The email relayers should now be visible within WHM.

If you would like to password protect a directory, create a .htaccess file in a directory which you wish to protect and insert the following parameters: AuthUserFile /home/username/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName “Private Area” AuthType Basic require valid-user > replace the “username” with the actual username. Create a .htpasswd file and place the username/password in the…

What is “SSH: POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!”? You may receive such a warning message when you SSH to a remote host. It is not as threatening as it sounds. When you SSH to a host, a series of checks are made to make sure you are connecting to the host you are expecting to connect to….

If you have 4 GB or more RAM on a Linux server, it may not show up the in the server. In this case you need to install PAE kernel package. This kernel package will support upto 64GB of memory. The non-PAE kernel can only address up to 4GB of memory. You can install the…