I’m always on the look out for helpful ‘tools’ and services. Usually, I work with Linux tools, but sometimes I need tools that work for Windows. There are a lot of great tools that have been developed for network and system maintenance for Windows, but since Windows is a Micro$oft product, they usually come with… Continue reading Windows Live Password Recovery

This morning I saw that libexpat was upgraded to 2.0.0. I simply emerged that and I thought all was good, but within minutes, I saw issues with my PHP CLI apps having problem. I noticed that expat was a USE flag, and I need to rebuild PHP against the new libexpat. No problem, so I… Continue reading Libexpat upgrade causes some problems

This post, I wanted to talk about fail2ban, and how you can use it for more than just blocking common SSH brute force login attempts. You see mention of this as a common defense for that, but since I access my servers from a static IP, I have strict port 22 iptable rules allowing certain… Continue reading Help your mail server with fail2ban

This small list of upload protections is geared towards a LAMP environment (Linux Apache Mysql PHP). Each web server and or language will have similar traits, but the tips listed below may not apply depending on your situation. 1. Don’t allow uploads. Sorry, that I even need to say this, but if your application doesn’t… Continue reading 10 Things you can do to protect file uploads via PHP on your Linux / Apache web server

Ah, so today the openssh/istate error relating with the rsync/scp is now resolved. The Gentoo folks were able to roll in 4.6_p1-r4 into portage. It’s not ‘stable’ so you’re going to need to use the x86 keyword (depending on your arch). Or you can simply add this version to /etc/portage/package.keywords =net-misc/openssh-4.6_p1-r4 ~x86 Here is the… Continue reading OpenSSH and istate error on rsync/scp resolved

Looks like they fixed the LDAP requirement bug in with p1-r3. This was related if you had a ldap as a USE flag. You would see an error similar to this: !!! ERROR: net-misc/openssh-4.6_p1-r2 failed. Call stack: ebuild.sh, line 1648: Called dyn_setup ebuild.sh, line 714: Called qa_call 'pkg_setup' ebuild.sh, line 44: Called pkg_setup openssh-4.6_p1-r2.ebuild, line… Continue reading Updates for OpenSSH

After upgrading to net-misc/openssh-4.6_p1-r2 this morning, I’m starting to see the following messages in the logs. This only seems to appear after rsync/ssh transactions. Aug 3 10:40:03 comp.com sshd[14636]: error: channel 0: chan_read_failed for istate 3 Aug 3 10:40:04 comp.com sshd[14637]: error: channel 0: chan_read_failed for istate 1 Aug 3 10:40:04 comp.com sshd[14637]: error: channel… Continue reading Issues with rsync/OpenSSH this morning

Yesterday, I talked about NetGong and their network management software. With today’s sponsored post, I’d like to about another suite of tools by the same company called NetInfo. NetInfo is a collection of some basic network related tools. Linux users are very familiar with these, possibly using them every day like myself. The application is… Continue reading NetInfo

I’m always interested in networking management software. I’ve played with a few from Cacti, Samhain, NMS, Nagios and to simple uptime tools like Mon. All of these are Linux based, but with this sponsored post, I’d like to talk about a Windows based solution called NetGong. NetGong use to be IPMonitor but changed their name… Continue reading NetGong

Today, I decided to update some of my boxes, one of my boxes is a VM-ware server host running on top of Gentoo. That host has two clients, another Gentoo server and a 2003 Windows server. Both of the Gentoo servers needed to go to 2.6.21-r4 kernels, so I thought this would be a good… Continue reading Oh vmware, why do you have to be so difficult!