Linux System Admins Blog

System admins of Promet – an e-commerce, high availability Open Source web shop – share their findings

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Entries Tagged as 'hosting'

Mail Relay Issue on Cpanel Server

February 16th, 2010 · No Comments

I noticed lots of email being relayed on one of our shared hosting server, CentOS5 with Cpanel and running Exim, and the strange thing is that the email server (MX) for these accounts are pointing to Google (GoogleApps), and we have correct entries for localdomains and remotedomains for these account. The relayers (‘From’ server/address) [...]

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Tags: Centos · Security · hosting · sysadmin

Apache Now Supports Multiple SSL on Single IP Address

November 24th, 2009 · 2 Comments

With the release of Apache 2.2.12, we can now configure multiple SSL sites in one IP address. It is available of you have Server Name Indication (SNI) extension for OpenSSL. Visit TechRepublic’s post on “Configure Apache to support multiple SSL sites on a single IP address” for details and vhost sample configuration. [...]

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Tags: News · hosting

Managed DNS services showdown

October 19th, 2009 · No Comments

A time comes when it makes more business sense to outsource DNS. While one can use a domain registrars to manage and host dns they do not always offer best performance or even offer SLA’s. We will compare a couple of companies that specialize at DNS hosting only.
DynDNS
- comprehensive services offerings
- no downtimes since inception [...]

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Tags: hosting

Iframe injection attack investigation

September 21st, 2009 · 4 Comments

The whole hidden IFRAME vulnerability has been going on for some time, only a few of our client have been effected by this. The net is still buzzing with this issue and while some are saying that the injection are results of php insecurities, mysql injection or cross site scripting, while others point to key [...]

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Tags: Security · hosting

enabling allow_url_include locally in cPanel

July 22nd, 2009 · No Comments

When using cPanel the way to enable allow_url_include directive locally (per user) is to create an Virtual Host include:
First create an include file:
/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/username/domain.com/custom.conf
Add directive to custom.conf:

php_admin_flag allow_url_include On

Then run to enable include:
/scripts/ensure_vhost_includes –user=username –verbose
Alternatively, enabling allow_url_include globally (server-wide) is done by editing /usr/local/lib/php.ini and adding “allow_url_include = On” directive to the Fopen wrapper section.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; [...]

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Tags: cpanel · hosting · sysadmin

nginx rewrite to index

May 27th, 2009 · No Comments

Looking to rewrite all file requests to index?
location / {
root /var/www/nginx-default;
index index.html;
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite . /index.html last;
}
}

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Tags: hosting

umask ‘ing apache under cPanel

May 14th, 2009 · No Comments

Ran into an issue today where a php created file was unreadable by other users or services that run under a different user. Since this is a software originated issue the sysadmin would love for the developer to change the code to include the chmod() php function to set permission to 644 after [...]

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Tags: Security · cpanel · hosting · sysadmin

Hawaii comes to our datecenter.

April 21st, 2009 · No Comments

Aside from missing coconut trees and hula girls distinguishing our data center from Hawaii was pretty tough this afternoon. It was HOT, so hot in fact that I was sweating while sitting in just a cotton tee-shirt. I kept drifting away into a daydream where that failed 20 ton Liebert A/C unit was running. Soon [...]

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Tags: hosting · monitoring

Force url to use SSL/https

March 9th, 2009 · 9 Comments

In some cases you would want to have your site use SSL (https://) at all times you can do this by using:
1.) Using Htaccess/mod_rewrite. You only need to create a .htaccess file on your home directory and add the codes below:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>

The above codes may not work on [...]

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Tags: hosting

Apache Solr drupal integration

March 4th, 2009 · 1 Comment

I am at Drupal Conference attending the Acquia Apache Solr presentation. This integration has a lot of promise in my opinion.  The drupal search is not that useful, we’ve actually replaced drupal search on our implementations with google custom search.
Apache Solr is an open source project:
Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on [...]

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Tags: drupal · hosting