Category: sysadmin

Virtualization Security

Theo de Raadt on virtualisation security: > Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits. You’ve been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it. x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct […]

CherryPy on Apache2 with mod_python

(This article is also available here) I’ve recently written a web application using Python using the following libraries: CherryPy v3.0.2 Mako v0.1.8 SQLAlchemy v0.3.7 CherryPy has a built-in web server which you can use during development and for actually running the application. I already had an Apache with some old PHP programs however, so I […]

DDoS attack paralyses Estonia

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe: At exactly 11 pm, Estonia was slammed with traffic coming in at more than 4 million packets per second, a 200-fold surge. Globally, nearly 1 million computers suddenly navigated to a multitude of Estonian sites, ranging from the foreign ministry to the major banks. It was […]

Why spamfilters are useless

I used to never get spam, until I made a little mistake in my mail client and sent mail to a mailinglist under my real email address. My address wound up on the big bad public internet, and a few hours later the first spam emails started to come in. I installed a quite sophisticated […]

PHP Configuration hell

From the Apache2 configuration file for host example.com: php_admin_value upload_tmp_dir “/var/www/example.com/tmp/” From the file /var/www/example.com/htdocs/test.php: var_dump(ini_get(“upload_tmp_dir”)); Output: string(29) “/var/www/example.com/tmp/” Then, after trying to upload a file, from the /var/www/example.com/logs/error.log: [Sun Sep 02 18:09:05 2007] [error] [client 88.211.179.104] PHP Warning: Unknown: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/tmp) is not within the allowed path(s): (/var/www/example.com/) in Unknown on […]

Server uptime geekery

[todsah@zoltar]~$ uptime 22:15:45 up 518 days, 10:02, 3 users, load average: 0.35, 0.10, 0.03 518 days, 10 hours and 2 minutes without rebooting. Pretty good. Of course, this is mostly because of the operating system: Debian GNU/Linux.

Ubuntu Linux… for your mom.

“This will be the year of Linux on the desktop!“. This has been the topic of tech-predicting articles on the web since at least 2001. It’s been repeated (and proved wrong) so many times, it’s even become an Internet meme. But ladies and gentlemen, rejoice. For the year of Linux on the desktop has arrived! […]

RDesktop goodness

Every now and then, I have to log into a windows machine in order to log expense reports or make a leave request for my work. (The application they use for that at my work doesn’t work properly in Firefox. Welcome to 2007.) Fortunately, we’ve got a big VMWare platform where I can login to […]

Jailing SFTP/SCP

Here’s how to set up a jailed / chrooted SFTP/SCP environment for a single user: Note: This is a little specific for Debian in some places, but it should work for other distributions too. You may need to tweak the jailkit configurations in /etc/jailkit/jk_init.ini a bit. Get jailkit (http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/index.html#download). Jailkit is an awesome tool that’ll […]

SFTP pointers

Some quick notes on SFTP. Identity file ssh and scp have an -i option for specifying which file has the private key with which to authenticate. sftp doesn’t have that switch, but you can specify one with the -o switch: sftp -o IdentityFile=/home/user/.ssh/some_key_rsa username@hostname Batch mode If you want to do stuff in batch mode […]

Search this blog: