Sysadmin Tools
« Previous EntriesCustom 404 for Apache (using PHP!)
Thursday, November 4th, 2010Images, css, js just get a simple 404 Not Found page. Everything not in the list of items we’re checking get redirected to the homepage. So a simple typo will get the redirect, but a missing PNG file that’s called by one of our pages won’t send a copy of the homepage to the client [...]
Rootkit Hunters
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010A few resources for finding rootkits: Linux: Rootkit Hunter Chkrootkit Windows: RootkitRevealer
Squid handling http –> https redirects
Friday, May 29th, 2009In configuring Squid to handle both our port 80 and 443 traffic, we have the issue that we can use redirects at the webserver level to redirect certain pages to https:// . So this is handled in Squid. First, make a simple script. There’s a possibility another redirector like Squirm might do a better job, [...]
Lighttpd, virtual hosts, alternative ports
Friday, May 29th, 2009In the configuration of our new server, all ports 80 and 443 traffic is handled by Squid as a reverse proxy. 8080 is the “backdoor” that bypasses Squid and hits Lighttpd directly. But the standard format of a Lighttpd virtual host entry doesn’t recognize alternate ports appended after the tld. Not a big deal, this [...]
Lighttpd, virtual hosts, and wildcard domains
Friday, May 29th, 2009So we’re setting up mirocommunity.com, and I don’t want to be hassled continously to create new hostnames in DNS. To avoid that, it’s a simple wildcard entry like this in the appropriate named database: *.mirocommunity.com. IN CNAME mirocommunity.com. Which directs everything to our server. Now our server hosts multiple sites via host entries, so we [...]
Optimizing Website integration with Amazon’s S3 Service
Saturday, February 28th, 2009At Participatory Culture Foundation we use Amazon’s S3 Service to host our static content — css, js, and images. This accomplishes two things — it improves the performance for our visitors since Amazon has faster performance and reliability then we can afford on our own servers, and it does so at a lower cost. In [...]
NTP Configuration
Thursday, January 24th, 20081) Install ntpd if not already there. Link it to your default startup directory. ln -s /etc/init.d/ntpd /etc/rc3.d/S99ntpd 2) /etc/ntp/step-tickers: time.nist.gov pool.ntp.org 3) In /etc/sysconfig/iptables open up the port: # NTP is only accessible via the Gig Backbone: -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state NEW -m udp -p udp –dport 123 -s 192.168.1.0/0 -j ACCEPT 4) [...]
Rainbow Tables
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007Lovely http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000949.html Use a program like Ophcrack to launch a brute force attack using Rainbow Tables. Rather then using bandwidth to download a Rainbow Table, and so you can customize the table with salts, extra characters, etc…get a RT Generator like the rtgen utility in the original RainbowCrack. Ah, longing for the quaint old [...]
Data Center Naming
Saturday, October 6th, 2007Consistent naming, along with good labelling, is a godsend in a crisis. Not say I can be obsessive on labeling server rooms, but there normally is a label maker with me when I’m on client sites. For Data Centers, Sun offers a really good guide at: http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0501/Naming.pdf Every data center should at least by XY gridded [...]
Terminology, Speeds, Etc
Saturday, October 6th, 2007Bits, Bytes, and Capitals… Although these seem to get interchanged often, and (except for confusing bits and bytes) don’t make a huge difference…we should try and use the correct, precise language. Bit is short for Binary digIT, and represents an on(1) or off(0). A bit is abbreviated with a lowercase b. [...]
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