I’ve noticed a lot more hacker attacks in the logs for the servers we maintain recently.
This is probably due to more people using Botnets for attack scan’s.

What are the hackers looking for, and how can we prevent them getting in?

In most cases, the hackers are looking for vulnerabilities in common applications.  The most notorious of these would be things like PHPBB, WordPress, and other similar apps.  The most common attacks we are noticing these days are ones that leverage remote inclusion of files.
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When I get time, I go through the logs and check out how the servers are doing.

One thing that I haven’t really done recently is to optimize the way things are configured.
The typical solution in most scenario’s is to throw faster hardware at things (something we do when necessary!), but sometimes a few minutes configuration can help speed things up tremendously.

Below are some tips for optimizing apache a little.

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The notes below are more for my benefit, but others may get some use out of it.
We use debian for our system, and are loosely based on the qmail setup over at http://qmail.jms1.net / http://qmailrocks.org
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Ok I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m a recalcitrant Mac user now thats quite happy to never use Windows again, especially after the mess that is Vista.  That said, we still have a good proportion of clients that haven’t been assimilated^H converted to Apple.

For at least the last 2 years, I’ve been telling people to use 360Safe antispyware software if they have the dreaded lurgy, er I mean Windows.

The number one issue people have is that its all in Chinese.

While its fun to say “It’s all Chinese to me”; or as my family back home like to rib me with the perenially popular in South Africa –  “Howzit my China”*, people do have a point.

*Yes, I know thats totally irrelevant, but I had to throw it in somewhere

So, without further ado or waffle masquerading as informative writing, I present to you below: Read more »

Windows XP usually plays nicely, but occasionally you do the odd recalcitrant box that doesn’t want to play nice with the other computers, and share.

If you’ve ruled out the Windows Firewall (Make sure that Windows File Sharing has a checkbox in there for allowed), and everything else looks correct, but it still isn’t working, try the following:

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This is a bit boring for non-techies, but useful for me as reference when I install a new server.

Sets up a a DNS caching server for the computer in question in order to speed up apache lookup, mail resolving etc.
Below assumes that server has no daemontools yadda yadda installed.

Setup in a shell script, and run as root. (If you trust me.)

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