Chris’ Blog

I now have a plugin installed generating a sitemap for Google

I use Firehol to firewall my server from the outside world, I have noticed packets being dropped coming in on correct ports. After a little investigation it turns out the netblocks these packets were coming from have recently been made available to registires, Firehol didn’t have an up to date list of the reserved ips and so was blocking these connections. On my debian system I modified the RESERVED_IPS variable to be as below, instead of the current value.

0.0.0.0/7 2.0.0.0/8 5.0.0.0/8 7.0.0.0/8 23.0.0.0/8 27.0.0.0/8 31.0.0.0/8 36.0.0.0/7 39.0.0.0/8 42.0.0.0/8 77.0.0.0/8 78.0.0.0/7 92.0.0.0/6 96.0.0.0/4 112.0.0.0/5 120.0.0.0/8 127.0.0.0/8 173.0.0.0/8 174.0.0.0/7 176.0.0.0/5 184.0.0.0/6 197.0.0.0/8 223.0.0.0/8 240.0.0.0/4

I installed mod_security on this server yesterday for a bit of extra umm security. Hopefully it made nothing go wonky, fingers crossed. Debian packages were supplied by: debian-unofficial.org and found using apt-get.org.

When I get a chance I am going to use these rules.

I will be without power (of the electrical variety tomorrow) so this site will be offline, for the duration of the power cut. Hopefully this time it actually goes ahead *sigh*. No idea what I am going to do tomorrow, maybe migrate to somebodies house, or go bum around the Mall (doubt I can sustain that for 7 hours though!) Maybe I should sleep through it, I could manage that!

My blog is back, yes it was offline yesterday and much of Friday, this is because I took delivery of two new hard discs to create a nice shiney RAID-1 array for my piece of mind the geek factor. Well anyway I have rebuilt my server up slowly ensuring I don’t screw too much up and make any of the mistakes I made last time. I am slowly bringing services back online, it took me until 3AM yesterday to get Debian GNU/Linux installed, mainly due to my in experience with RAID and not knowing the best way to go about the partitioning. But anyway I did it! Then the initial RAID sync took a good 3 hours to complete! So I went to sleep, woke up this morning and got cracking. Got DNS up first so all my domain names would resolve, got some basic services like SSH installed and then proceeded to take a copy of the old HDD contents for reference and use of configuration files. Next came e-mail because e-mails destined for my Inbox were floating aimlessly around in cyberspace trying to get in only to be told that nobody was here. Got version control (SVN) restored next so my fellow developers could actually do something! Then around to the rest of my sites, which are sitll not fully transferred but I am getting there.

I still have a fair bit to do such as, UPS monitoring, administration web, my cron jobs, locking down the firewall, installing eAccelerator for PHP, plus various tweaks and adjustment that come to mind. Until the next time, which will be shortly, got two videos to post

Well my blog received its first spam comments this week, yay. I guess that means there is more on the way

Yesterday I did some tuning of my trusty server, I tweaked Apache, MySQL, Bind and some other applications to run in less memory and in some cases more responsively. Thanks very much to Martin for the help with that. Other sites around the web played their part too:

• http://www.bind9.net/manual/bind/9.3.0/Bv9ARM.ch06.html
• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=468168
• http://www.mkdoc.org/docs/howto/server-tuning/
• http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/01/tuning-apache-part-1.html
• http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html

I also took the time to use some funky ‘pinning’ in Ubuntu to grab PHP 5.1.4 from another repository, that was the hardest part, took me around 4 attempts of removing PHP and reinstalling to get it going.

I am going to be without power (of the electrical kind) for most of Friday 19^th May so, this site will not be available. Friday cooincides with my last of school, ever, and the piss up party in the evening.

I have taken a couple of hours this weekend to secure my server a bit more, this entailed installing Firehol and fail2ban, this combination of goodies gives me server nice layer of protection to sit behind. A very secure firewall, which should protect against DoS attacks and other nasties, and only allow certain connections to make a connection to my server (http, https, ssh, ftp, smtp.) fail2ban is the dead cool bit start trying to guess my ssh password, or guess the phpMyAdmin password you get your ass firewalled off my server :). Ohh and I get an e-mail telling me ;).

When I have a little more time I need to configure the firewall to only allow certain outgoing connections to for added security.

Thanks to Martin for a little inspiration, encouragement, and documentation!

I finally decided to commit myself to upgrading WordPress this morning, I am now running the latest release (2.0.2), the upgrade was painless enough.