WordPress 3.2 now requires:

PHP 5.2.2 or above
MySql 5.0 or above

The problem with this is how does one know?

Simple Plugin Method

The simplest option is to install a new plugin called ‘Is Your Server Ready for WordPress 3.2′ once activated this plugin will show a message at the top of your screen

Linux Command Line:

# php -v
PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Apr  9 2010 08:23:39)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies
 with the ionCube PHP Loader v4.0.0, Copyright (c) 2002-2010, by ionCube Ltd.

#mysql -V
mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.1.41, for debian-linux-gnu (i486) using readline 6.1

PHP Info Page

Create your self a file in notepad (or other text editor) and save it as phpinfo.php

add the following to the contents of that file:

<?php
phpinfo()
?>

Upload that file to your server and then browse to it, this will give you an info screen showing the configuration of your server, it will show the versions of MySQL and PHP alone with all the extensions installed on your server.

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I have been running a ShevaPlug Ubuntu server for some time now, this has controlled the Networks DHCP and controlled Internet access, I have it running DansGuardian which protects the little one from the unsavory side of the Internet. I also have it running as a proxy so that I can scan all traffic through ClamAV for Viruses. This is not a really necessary step but it does keep thinks a little safer.

The problems I had moving the USB Disks to the Ubuntu ShevaPlug was the file system on those disks, they were in NTFS, perfectly ok for Windows 7 but ubuntu complained about it, so I ended up re-formatting them all the EXT4 which makes a vast difference in terms of the performance of those disks.

I have now completed the system, I have 4 Western Digital 2tb USB Disks attached to a USB hub which then goes straight into the ShevaPlug, on ubuntu I have then setup Samba Shares:

[Photographs]
comment = Photographs
path = /mnt/Disk2/Photographs
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0777
writeable = Yes

One share for each type of media, DVCam, Photographs, Movies, DVDs, Music etc.

Each one of those shares is then mapped as a network drive on each PC (All running Windows 7) and then the Windows 7 Media Centre looks to those network drives for its media, thus all share the media.

The only small problem I have now is that I can not find a way to force Windows 7 Media Centre to record its TV directly to a different location, it always puts it in its default Recorded TV folder. Ideally I would like to have it record to a mapped network drive, as currently newly recorded TV is only available on the media centre that recorded it.

Here is a diagram of what I have done:

When I run out of Space on a Drive I can just add another disk to the USB Hub and create another Samba Share. Eventually it will mean that we have Movies1 and Movies2 but this will not create a problem as those drives are not accessed directly but rather via the Windows 7 Media Centre Interface which will just show all Movies it knows about.

All in all very pleased with this and it seems to be working well thus far. I have put all the disks under the stairs to keep them out of the way, I also have the router, network switch and ShevaPlug under there so I need to build a shelf to support them and keep them out of the way.

This system has also allowed me to create a Samba Share for other things, my work files and business files are all located on a share, which I then back up to Amazon S3 daily to keep it secure.

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I can of course find out the disk usage quite easily logging into the Ubuntu box via SSH and running a ‘df -h’ which will show the disk space free on each disk:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                 251M     0  251M   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                251M  5.8M  246M   3% /var/run
varlock               251M     0  251M   0% /var/lock
udev                  251M  152K  251M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 251M     0  251M   0% /dev/shm
rootfs                  7.4G  3.0G  4.1G  42% /
/dev/sda1             917G  627G  244G  72% /mnt/Disk1
/dev/sdb1             917G  640G  232G  74% /mnt/Disk2
/dev/sdd1             917G  415G   22G  96% /mnt/Disk3
/dev/sde1             917G  601G  316G  69% /mnt/Disk4

New media is being recorded to these disks all the time, recorded TV in HD, New photos added, music added and DVDs added all the time so I wanted a method that would alert me via email when a disk became critically full so that I could take action to add more disk space (looking at those stats above it does not look like long before I will need to add another drive or two to the system!

Following a Google search I found the following script on this site

#!/bin/sh
df -H | grep -vE '^Filesystem|tmpfs|cdrom' | awk '{ print $5 " " $1 ' | while read output;
do
  echo $output
  usep=$(echo $output | awk '{ print $1' | cut -d'%' -f1  )
  partition=$(echo $output | awk '{ print $2 ' )
  if [ $usep -ge 90 ]; then
    echo "Running out of space \"$partition ($usep%)\" on $(hostname) as on $(date)" |
     mail -s "Alert: Almost out of disk space $usep%" you@somewhere.com
  fi
done

This was the exact solution I was looking for. I then created a crontab to run hourly and run the script:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 * * * * /root/diskMonitor

The only problem with this is, if i do not sort out the disk space it will keep sending the emails, perhaps not a bad thing if it keeps nagging me.

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Let me back track a little and give some background, at home we run a Windows 7 Media Centre, my main desktop and two laptops also run Windows 7 and as such have Media centre capabilities. Until now, I have attached external USB drives to the Media Centre PC in the front room, this solution was fine and has worked well, however, this does mean that the disks are all in the living room and as such a little messy and the shares are managed by the media centre PC its self, thus when the laptops access media the main media centre PC slows down.

We will be adding another Media centre to our network for the Orangery Kitchen Extension, and I have also installed a Satellite with picks up Freesat HD so I will be buying some Satellite receivers for the media centres and soon will be recording HD video, which will compound the problems.

I wanted to move all the storage into a single location, and as I have a ShevaPlug that runs the rest of the network (DHCP, Dansguardian, Squid Proxy and virus scanning) it made sense that this system running Ubuntu would also manage the network shares. A simple job of just plugging in a USB hum to the ShevaPlug, mounting the USB disks in Ubuntu and away we go…

Reality was not so simple, the main problems came around the NTFS file systems on the USB drives. Ubuntu does not support this natively (or my install does not) so I had to install ntfs-3g, no problems, and after a short while I got the disks mounted and up and running. I then started to try and play media from those disks and to copy some media back to them, every thing seemed very, very slow.

I was getting transfer rates of less than 2MB/sec, Okay this was over the network from the media centre to the Shevaplug Samba share, but the network I have setup is all running at 1Gb, all switches are 1Gb and all network deices (apart from wireless ones) are 1Gb, so this speed was very disappointing.

While investigating this, I was logged onto SSH on the Ubuntu Shevaplug. I noticed that SSH seemed to be running very sluggish, I had the bad feeling that the Shevaplug was not powerful enough to do what I wanted, but after doing a ‘top’ command to find out what the thing was actually doing, I found that ntfs-3g was running 90% of the processor and had taken all of the available memory.

A quick search on google revealed that NTFS-3g is notoriously poor and many people recommended keeping clear of it.

This presented a problem of what to do.

I had a spare disk so I set about trying different file system formats and the one I have ended up with is EXT4. I now have transfer speeds of 60MB/sec and more so I am well pleased with that.

Changing the file system obviously meant that I had to re-format the disks, so moving 2Tb of data from one place to another, finding space on different PCs for all the date while I cleared the first fist for formatting, then moving date from disk to disk to format each to EXT4.

I now have it all back up and running, all EXT4 disks, all my Samba shares setup and the media centre is currently re-indexing all the media, and everything looks good.

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Open an ssh terminal and type:

cat /etc/lsb-release

this will then show:

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS"


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I have been using VPSville for some time for my domain network and other projects and have always been impressed with their service.

I have signed up for two of their Semi dedicated vps servers which they call ‘Megacity’ one to host my mail server and another to host my affiliate websites.

The VPSville control panel is very easy to use and fully functional, you can easily create new servers, reboot, gain SSH access, change passwords, monitor bandwidth and many other features.

They provide 25% discount on repeat custom. I currently have 10 VPS servers with them and two of the semi-dedicated servers. Discounts are also available if you may for 3, 6 or 12 months upfront.

Their prices go from £3.75 for their smallest server which they call Village with 64mb guaranteed RAM (burst to 128) 100GB Bandwidth and 5GM of disk space, up to £47.25 for their Megacity 3 Semi-Dedicated servers which 2Gb of RAM bursting to 4gb and 3000Gb Bandwidth and 160Gb of disk space.

They have Data centers in the UK, US and Canada, but appear to be a Canadian company. I have only used the London Data centre but have had no trouble with them at all.

I can not comment about support as I have had no reason to use support for anything, but if I do I will update this post with the results.

They take various forms of payment, the most critical one for me is Paypal as most of my business goes through Paypal. The only one comment I would make is that when buying a new server I can not seem to find the subscribe via Paypal option only a one off payment option, however, when you go into the existing account you can expand the payment options and create a Paypal subscription.

Another key advantage for me is that they do not have any fixed term contracts, you can pay month to month. This means that if I need a server for a project I can create one to use as a development server for £3.75 for a month and then kill it when I move the project onto my main web server.

Click here and use the coupon code SP25 to get started with VPSville

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On Ubuntu this is very simple just run the command:

sudo apt-get install php5-gd

and then restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

then try to upload a new image and it will offer you all the different sizes for your image.

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1. Disable SSH if you do not need it

If you do not need ssh then disable it as it is always a vulnerability. If you are running a desktop/laptop with Ubuntu on it then remove ssh

apt-get remove openssh-server

2. Do not allow root login

The root user is the master user on your server, it gives access to everything and permissions to do anything on your server. If that gets hacked it is the worst possible scenario for your server.

Why risk allowing people to do brute force attacks on the root user? Make sure that you stop root from being able to directly access SSH.

Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and change:

PermitRootLogin yes

to

PermitRootLogin no

Then restart ssh by running /etc/init.d/ssh restart

You will then have to SU from another user to become root or even better use the sudo command before executing root commands.

3. Restrict the users who can access the server via SSH

In addition to the above, you can restrict SSH access to your server to a limited number of users. In my case, I have only two users that can access the server via SSH, mine and the hosts support user.

Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and add:

AllowUsers username1 username2

to the bottom of the file

Then restart ssh by running /etc/init.d/ssh restart

4. Don’t use obvious usernames

As with everything, we are trying to make things a little harder for hackers. If you use an obvious or well known username, you are open to brute force attacks on that username. So don’t use obvious users.

5. Use Secure passwords

Make sure that your users password is secure, use alpha numeric passwords with mixed case and try to use special characters in your password.

6. Change the default ssh port

On the same theme as changing the default settings, you should change the default ssh port.

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

and change where it says ‘port 22′ to a port number of your choice.

Then restart ssh by running /etc/init.d/ssh restart

7. Keep OpenSSH up-to-date

Make sure that you keep your whole system up-to-date especially OpenSSH

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

8. Always use ssh protocol 2

Most modern versions of linux will already be configured to run with ssh protocol 2 by default but it is always worth checking

edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

and check the protocol line says 2 and NOT 1

Protocol 2

Protocol 1 is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks

Then restart ssh by running /etc/init.d/ssh restart

9. Idle timeout

The idle timeout terminates an ssh session after a given period of inactivity. This is especially useful to prevent vulnerabilities from unattended ssh sessions. This is not as much a hack, but an opportunist but it is worth considering depending on your situation.

edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

ClientAliveInterval 300
ClientAliveCountMax 0
Then restart ssh by running /etc/init.d/ssh restart

10. Use Keys

A safe method of securing your SSH is by using keys. I will not go through the detailshere as they have been done before but take a look at the following tutorials:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-keyc.html

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ssh-password-less-login-with-dsa-publickey-authentication/

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ssh-passwordless-login-with-keychain-for-scripts/

11. Stop brute force attacks

Brute force attacks are where a hacker keeps trying a username with different passwords until they find one that matches. You can use software such as fail2ban or DenyHosts

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I use WordPress as the backbone to 90% of my sites, this being so it is critically important that it is secure. I have therefore been researching methods to make those installs more secure. Here is what I have found:

The Obvious:

1. Keep up-to-date

Always use the latest version of Wordpres, there is no excuse not to, WordPress now has an inbuilt update feature which is very simple to use. Make sure that you use the latest version of WordPress, All plugins and all themes, even if those plugins or themes are not active.

2. Admin User

Although WordPress 3.x allows you to  choose your WordPress admin username, many people still use ‘admin’ especially if you have upgraded from older version of WordPress and have a pre-existing user.

The problem with this is that it is known by hackers who can try and use brute force attacks on your password. If they do not know your username they have to do a brute force attack on both your username and password and get them to match and as such the likelihood of getting the correct combination is reduced

Change your admin user to something else using the SQL command:

UPDATE wp_users SET user_login = ‘YourChosenUser’ WHERE user_login = ‘Admin’;

3. Use a secure password

I use http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/to create strong passwords. Make sure you do not use dictionary words as many brute force attacks use dictionaries to work through tries on your password.

Tips are to use numbers and letters, mixes case and some characters.

4. Add Keys to the wp-config.php file

WordPress 3.x does this for you, but it is worth checking that you have the keys completed in your wp-config.php file. It should look something like:

define('AUTH_KEY',        '19[9lL.u~lwAMWEv-HwZ+@Fm{1FP+<jDgcq|GMF|G@Oklq_w;ftPlsXO@|S^4');

define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'JiSUZrIM5T!7$z;rcS];qL>L L)c@,Tqe~B=#M=V,Wgb:>F|h$d0g55)!_9Ol-');

define('LOGGED_IN_KEY',   'm~ v--9/-l+9=[$VD($<o-Afz(8uxH[p4yaVnTR3Zf5mbV6PUdu3W?J|Wr8/:`e');

define('NONCE_KEY',       '%i.WRYyslvZ.C*Np5L5S27t4 ihJF,HMhy~$aEKV0#=/`I~$o-Mu<revq/fIhb+e');

define('AUTH_SALT',        '[J&pERV+!rfO6|n0OzNo5g7 P .cOia|{^4A$Ol4w`([o-JC3:|D3nTXDx4S9H');

define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', '%P)h3cUD=EX/2z+EY@/~i;%TjlB(EL]RB]N,B)7Tr+Rw(L2:i(V+N+VS5i2Obu0I');

define('LOGGED_IN_SALT',   'n|yRYtIi#y5Q|-3|Y~-y]f0t|1n,aE7M@ubchoibda?RDdeCwRC|~e)-d?u*JJMc');

define('NONCE_SALT',       'w|1+voiV-[q5,F3,M@wOLvOJJz*>&3Ui9drlQ{Q>Ls2|#lZVzA46?&+6&Vrgg1x');

The Not-So Obvious

5. Database setup - user, password, and database

Make sure you create a database for each blog, if one is compromised you do not want it affecting any other sites you may have on your server.

Make sure you create a username for each of the installs, do not share them between wordpress installs and DO NOT USE ROOT!

The user should be a limiuted userm grant it SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE privileges.
mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE ON wordpress.* TO 'wordpress'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'newpassword';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Make sure that your user only has local access to your database, so that it can not access your database remotely.

6. Do not use default wp_ table prefixes

Don't use the default wp_ prefix to table names. This method is useful but should not be relied upon for a security fix, one a hacker has got as far as being able to conduct SQL injections or other hack then this method will not prevent them getting further for very long, but it will keep them guessing. Do not use the default wp_ prefix instead use a random one.

This is rather more difficult if you are trying to secure a site that has already been setup, but you can use the WP Security Plugin to do this

7. SSL for wp-admin

SSL connections are far more secure than normal http connections so, force SSL for admin add the line define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true); to your wp-config.php file Options All -Indexes to your .htaccess file

8. Allow access to your wp-admin from one IP Address

Although this method worries me, due to loosing access to my files I have implemented it to see how it goes. If you have a static IP address you can Secure the wp-admin files from being edited. By default all but the wp-config.php file can be edited via the wordpress admin area.

If you add a .htaccess file to your wp-admin folder and add the following:

Order Deny,Allow
Allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
Deny from all

This will then only allow you to edit those files from the IP address specified

You can use other options in the IP address such as:

A (partial) domain-name - Example: Allow from apache.org
A full IP address - Example: Allow from 10.1.2.3
A partial IP address - Example: Allow from 10.1
A network/netmask pair - Example: Allow from 10.1.0.0/255.255.0.0
A network/nnn CIDR specification - Example: Allow from 10.1.0.0/16

9. Deny access to the wp-config.php file

Perhaps a safer method than the above would be to specifically deny access to your wp-config.php file, thus keeping your database username and password more secure.

Add the following line to you r.htaccess file in the root of your site

<FilesMatch ^wp-config.php$>deny from all</FilesMatch>

10. Move wp-config.php file to a directory below the one it is currently in

for example if your is the is setup as such:

/var/www/domain.com/htdocs/Site files here

you can move the wp-config.php file to below the htdocs folder i.e.

/var/www/domain.com/

WordPress will handle this change automatically and allow you to have the wp-config.php file below the web root which is a great deal more secure.

11. Add Apache Level security to wp-admin

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Domain.com WordPress Admin"
AuthUserFile /var/www/domain.com/.auth/.htpasswd
Require user domainAdmin

htpasswd -cm /var/www/domain.com/.auth/.htpasswd domainAdmin

12. Blacklist ip addresses

Edit the .htaccess file in the root of your site and add the following:

<Limit GET POST PUT>
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 123.456.789
deny from 93.121.788
deny from 223.956.789
deny from 128.456.780
</LIMIT>

Add the ip address of the visitor you want to ban, you can add multiple deny from xxx lines to ban multiple addresses.

This may not be as useful unless you are actively monitoring your logs, but it can be useful if you get a great deal of SPAM comments from one user.

You can also use the Lockdown plugin to record all failed attempts to access your wordpress admin. You can then add the IP address to the ban list.

13. Stop WordPress serving anything other than images from the wp-content/uploads folder

You can secure the wp-content/uploads directory to stop it serving anything other than images

Order Allow,Deny
Deny from all
<filesMatch  "\.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png|js|css)$">
Allow from all
</filesMatch>

Remember if you want to include other file types in your WordPress posts you will have to add them to the list for example a pdf document, you would add pdf to the 'files' line.

14. Stop SQL injection attacks

Although WordPress should already do this for your you can ensure that you stop SQL injection attacks. SQL injection attacks are where malicious users use forms on your site to add code to database records.

Add the following to the .htaccess file in the root of your website.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

15. Remove your WordPress version

Sounds crazy but you should really do this. If hackers find a vulnerability in a particular build of WordPress then they will use search engines to find sites using that version and then exploit that vulnerability.

edit functions.php file of your theme and add the following line to it remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

16. Stop search engines indexing any of your WP- folders

add the following to your robots.txt file:

Disallow: /wp-*

This in combination with not allowing browsing of these folders will stop those files from being accessed.

17. Lockdown Plugin to stop brute force attacks

Using the Lockdown plugin to ban addresses after a certain number of failed login attempts will help prevent brute force attacks.

18. Use WordPress Firewall plugin

I have blogged before about the default set of plugins that I install, this is one of them, make sure you get it installed as it protects you against some of these holes especially SQL injection attacks.

19 File permissions

Here is a quick run down of some file permissions to check for your wordpress install are as follows:

../ 0755
../wp-includes 0755
../.htaccess 0644
index.php 0644
js/ 0755
../wp-content/themes 0755
../wp-content/plugins 0755
../wp-admin 0755
../wp-content 0755

On linux command line run 'chmod 0755 wp-includes -R' for example, or you can use your ftp client.

All my servers have ftp disabled as this is another potential security hole.

20. Backup, Backup, Backup

Ok this is not strictly a security fix, but it the worse happens it will help you to recover. Make sure you back everything up, WordPress install, uploaded files and critically the database. I use BackWPup which can up your data to Amazon S3. Very cheap method of keeping secure backups of your blog., or to FTP.

It is worth pointing out that if your site is hacked make sure you check all the files in the backup you are using before you restore. If a backup has run after the hack then any malicious files may be present in the backup.

If you are in this situation use the backup for your database and for any uploaded files and get a fresh copy of WordPress and any plugins.

Note:

Even with all these methods you may still be vulnerable, holes in your web server security, holes in plugins that you use or any number of factors could allow you to be compromised, but with these methods you are gaining more of the upper hand in the battle against hackers.

As a WordPress plugin developer I am looking into the possibility of creating a plugin that does some if not all of these methods for you or at least checks them and gives you advice as to how to improve the security. During this research I have found many plugins out there that claim to do this, some work better than others, indeed some do not work at all, but none are comprehensive and as such I think I will attempt to code one up that will do or check this list of 20 tips.

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I have setup two new servers, one dedicated to email and the other to the webserver. I have still to setup all the mailboxes and websites, but if you are seeing this post then you are viewing this blog on the new web server.

The race is on over the next couple of days to setup all the websites again and get the DNS updated to the new IP addresses for both the A and MX records.

I think Debian 4 had significant vulnerabilities, recently the repros were all archived indicating that the developers had dropped support for it. I have therefore moved to a far more up-to-date OS in Ubuntu 10.04. I have other servers and VPS servers already running Ubuntu 10.04 so there is no problem with that at all. It is just the work involved in setting everything up again.

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The latter two have been suffering from numerous malicious attacks. The email server was hacked a couple of months ago and since then it has not been quite right, even though I have spent a great deal of time trying to fix it, emails are still getting spammed and the level of spam getting through and being delivered to mailboxes is very high. Some mailboxes seem to be affected more than others.

My Linux box running my affiliate websites was hacked yesterday, I was alerted by someone to the problem, and since then GoDaddy have contacted me saying that one of the domains registered with them has been compromised. Fortunately I already had a root SSH session open to the server, running a ‘who’ command showed another active SSH session. It appeared they had created themselves another user on the system.

I say fortunately I had a root session open as it turned out that they had changed the root ssh password.

I am not sure how they got in but they have corrupted several of my sites and installed Phishing scripts. I have removed everything and I am in the process of repairing the damage, but I do think that it is time to start afresh with a new server for both my MX and affiliates projects servers.

The current servers are both Debian 4 and as such are now out of date in terms of their OS so I would be better off starting with a new server running the latest version of Ubuntu.

The only problem with it is I have 100′s of affiliate websites running on that server and quite a number of domains and mailboxes managed by the MX server. The time involved in this, changing DNS, setting up the domains and mailboxes will be quite considerable and at the moment I really do not have the time to dedicate to this.

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About 2 months ago my server was hacked, at that time all I could find in terms of malicious damage was that the root password had been changed and all the other users had been removed from the sudo’ers list.

Since then I have been having great difficulty with the email side of the server, it always seems to have a large number of mails in the main queue, genuine emails are getting spammed (but only on specific addresses), both the volume of SPAM recieved and the amount of SPAM delivered as genuine mail has increased dramatically.

Take Saturday morning for example. I checked my email at around 7:30am and left all mailboxes with no uunread messages, deleting any spam and clearing them up. I then went to one of our properties to do some work and checked my email at around 9:30 and there were 21,000 emails that had been delivered to that mailbox.

My poor HTC Touch could not cope with that volume of emails and while trying to clear those emails it died, since that the phone has not been right, randomly re-booting even thought I have done a hard reset.

It has also come to my attention that emails from some of the feedback and contact forms on my websites are getting spammed and as such the customers for my plugins especially are unable to get support.

There is clearly something wrong with the configuration of SpamAssasin somewhere, but what is the big question. I am tempted to setup a temporary VPS and create a new MX server on that so that I can compare the setup, even move some of the mailboxes across to that, although I would not want that as a permanent solution as I have a high powered dedicated server which I would rather keep as my main server.

It has been said before that the few kill the internet for the rest of us, my server currently handles around 250,000 emails per week, with maybe 1000 of those genuine. The wasted server power and resources costs business a huge amount of money. I am not sure what to do about this, my most immediate action is to try and find out why emails from my feedback and contact forms are being spammed, perhaps I need to add some more headers to the php email.

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I have encountered one problem. When I go to sites such as Google Keyword tool, or I run some of my more complicated scripts that take longer to run it seems to create problems. I am wondering if this is some sort of time out fault that I will be able to change in the setup of Squid or if it is a power issue with the SheevaPlug.

This is not an issue for most normal users, I have tried it on things like YouTube and BBC Iplayer and it works fine with those so I suspect it is something specific to the style of those pages that causes a problem.

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If you remember from my previous post I wanted this device to run a network content filter, Squid and Dansguardian and also to take control of the network I have at home. I therefore, went for the 8GB SD card with Ubuntu 9.04 pre-installed. I will take an image of this before I start to play with it although one can be downloaded from the NewIT website if I need to. I also went for the Sata version so that I can add hard disk space to the device in the future to make it into a NAS drive as well as a network content filter.

First Steps

So my first step was to simply plug the device into my home network, a very simple task of plugging in a network cable and plugging in the power.

I then logged onto my router which currently runs my DHCP and found that a device called Ubuntu had been given an IP address.
Opening up Putty (My preferred SSH client) and ssh’ing to the ip address, I was able to log into the device with the root login and the default password of ‘nosoup4u’

The first impression of the device while navigating around the system via SSH and running the ‘top –d1’ command seemed to be fairly quick, ok the device is not doing anything other than running base Ubuntu but still a good sign at this stage.

I also ran ‘free -m’ which showed 472mb of free memory and df –f to find the free disk space showed:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                 251M     0  251M   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                251M   36K  251M   1% /var/run
varlock               251M     0  251M   0% /var/lock
udev                  251M  116K  251M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 251M     0  251M   0% /dev/shm
rootfs                7.4G  443M  6.6G   7% /

All looks in order and I was ready to start playing with the system to see what it could do, but first I wanted to take an image of the system as a backup.

Imaging the SD Disk

I was not sure how I was going to do this so I did a little bit of research for the best method, but I plumped for a simple TAR of the whole system using linux its self:

tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/backup.tgz /

remembering to exclude the backup file its self otherwise it would get into some sort of loop! The tar of the whole system took only 2 minutes and created a file that was 135 Mb. I then sent this across to my Western Digital MyBookWorld NAS drive which has a hacked Linux operating system on it

scp backup.tgz root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/shares/internal/backups/

Happy that I had a backup of the system I then went ahead with a system update before trying a setup of Dansguardian.

System update

I ran apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade and upgraded the whole system. It wanted to upgrade the following:

The following packages will be upgraded:
 root@ubuntu:/# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
cron dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dpkg file gzip language-pack-en language-pack-en-base libcurl3-gnutls libgnutls26 libkrb53 libldap-2.4-2 libmagic1 libnewt0.52 libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g
  libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules libsqlite3-0 libssl0.9.8 libvolume-id1 libxcb1 lsb-base lsb-release ntpdate openssl perl perl-base perl-modules sudo tzdata udev wget whiptail
35 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 18.2MB of archives.
After this operation, 1565kB of additional disk space will be used.

This process was again fairly quick taking just 5 minutes most of which was taken downloading the 18mb as Karoo Internet is simply rubbish!
I restarted the device just to check everything was still ok

Shutdown –r now

It took less than a minute to start back up and was back with me.

I then changed the root password ‘passwd’ and I was ready to start my install of dansguardian.

Install of Dansguardian

The setup I wanted was one with Squid for the proxy, ClamAV for virus scanning and then Dansguardian for the content filtering. I followed a tutorial guide on how to forge
http://www.howtoforge.com/squid-proxy-server-on-ubuntu-9.04-server-with-dansguardian-clamav-and-wpad-proxy-auto-detection
but I would skip the auto-detection part as I did not need this and could always add it at a later date.

The first step is to install ClamAV

apt-get install clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam

I then needed to edit the ClamAV conf file so I ran

Vim  /etc/clamav/freshclam.conf

And found that vim was not installed so I installed it

Apt-get install vim

Once installed I could then edit the conf file above. FreshClam is the part of ClamAV that downloads the new virus definitions. The config file contains a line ‘checks 24’ which indicates that FreshClam will check for new definitions 24 times a day or once every hour. I decided that would be adequate o accepted the default values, So my freshclam.conf file looks like this:

# Automatically created by the clamav-freshclam postinst
# Comments will get lost when you reconfigure the clamav-freshclam package

DatabaseOwner clamav
UpdateLogFile /var/log/clamav/freshclam.log
LogVerbose false
LogSyslog false
LogFacility LOG_LOCAL6
LogFileMaxSize 0
LogTime no
Foreground false
Debug false
MaxAttempts 5
DatabaseDirectory /var/lib/clamav/
DNSDatabaseInfo current.cvd.clamav.net
AllowSupplementaryGroups false
PidFile /var/run/clamav/freshclam.pid
ConnectTimeout 30
ReceiveTimeout 30
ScriptedUpdates yes
CompressLocalDatabase no
NotifyClamd /etc/clamav/clamd.conf
# Check for new database 24 times a day
Checks 24
DatabaseMirror db.local.clamav.net
DatabaseMirror database.clamav.net

You then need to restart ClamAV

/etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam restart

It was then time to install Squid, again an easy process with apt

apt-get install squid

Then to make some modifications to the squid conf files:

Vim /etc/squid/squid.conf

Just adding ‘http_port 3128’  to the bottom of the file and then restart squid

/etc/init.d/squid reload

Finally it was the turn of Dansguardian, again a simple task using apt:

apt-get install dansguardian

Again some modifications to the dansguardian conf files

Vim /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf

I simply added my SheevaPlug Server IP address to the ‘filterip =’ line
Uncommented the line:

contentscanner = '/etc/dansguardian/contentscanners/clamav.conf'

to enable the ClamAV virus Scanning and then commented out the line:

#UNCONFIGURED - Please remove this line after configuration

Then restarted dansguardian:

/etc/init.d/dansguardian restart

Testing the install

The system was then ready and I added the proxy settings to my web browser with the address of the SheevaPlug server and then a port of 8080

I then tried Google which was accessed no problem, and then google’d for some adult terms which were blocked.

I do not like the default ‘blocked site’ template that dansguardian uses but I am sure I can change that as it looks like a simple HTML page.
I also need to re-configure the router to stop it handing out ip addresses and limit access to it to the ipaddress of the Sheevaplug and then add DHCP to the sheevaplug but I will carry on with this at a later date.

The SheevaPlug review

I am very pleased with how well this has gone and the performance of the Sheevaplug. I will continue to use this content filtering on my own laptop to see how it goes and test the performance of the Sheevaplug. The first impressions and results are very good indeed.

EDIT:

I should have given a link to NewIT who sell these little SheevaPlug systems they can be found at http://www.newit.co.uk defiantly worth a try.

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Although I like the idea of NetNanny and similar products, they are all focused around one PC and controlling that one PC or one profile on that PC. As an IT professional I have a number of computers all over the house, A Media Centre, a laptop for both Cheryl and myself and a PC in my office. With the new kitchen extension we will have another LCD TV along with a media centre PC. So the access to computers in the house is rather open.

I want to control the network we have at home rather better anyway. Currently I allow the router to do all the work, it handles the DHCP and the control of the network. I would like to have more control over that and as such a Linux server to control the network would be ideal.

This being so I would then be able to use Squid proxy to filter content on the network, I could then install Dansguardian on top of Squid to filter our Adult content and provide me with more control.

The only problem with this is that I do not like the idea of a server type PC, this both because I do not like the idea of having it running constantly as that could become costly, but also the size and noise of such a machine does not lend its self to the home environment.

I have been looking at low power PC options and have found the Sheeva plug system which is an ARM based mini PC which is the size of a standard power supply.There are a few options but the one that I was looking at was the Sheeva Plug Multi which takes an SD card for the OS. You can optionally buy an SD with an OS pre-installed Debian 6 or Ubuntu 9. Or you can download the CD Card Images from their site.

Sheva Plug

This is ideal as I want to have a system running Ubuntu as my tests with Dansguardian in VirtualBox have all been with Ubuntu and the install went very easily.

The system has a 1.2Ghz ARM processor with 512Mb of Flash Ram and 512 Mb of DDR2 Memory.It has a Gigabit Ethernet port, USB2 port and ESATA type II port. It does not have a VGA or other monitor port, the idea behind this is that you would access it via SSH which suits me. It also has the ability for another SD card to be plugged in or the USB and ESATA ports give the opportunity to add storage to the device effectively giving you a NAS solution.

The power consumption at about 19w is a little higher than some ‘Low power PC’ options, but at £89 I do not think that you can argue that, especially for the size of the device and being able to hide it away in a draw or behind a desk somewhere without it causing trouble with noise.

My only concern about this is that once I setup this system, I will change all the browsers settings of all the PCs on the network so that they run through the Squid proxy rather than directly to the router. I need to figure out how to stop the router accepting traffic from anything else other than the Squid proxy server so that you can not simply take out the proxy settings.

I have a fairly advanced Billion router (I forget the model) but I ams sure that somewhere on its configuration this will be possible.

I will be placing an order for this device and I will post her how my trials go with setting it up as both a home network server and as a content filter or net nanny.

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I changed my repros in /etc/apt/sources.list to:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-volatile etch/volatile main contrib non-free
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-security etch/updates main contrib non-free

and then ran an apt-get update again, this updated the repros, before I installed pspell i decided to run an apt-get update to ensure that everything else was up-to-date. It upgraded some minor stuff, but it did upgrade both Amavis-new and MySQL server.

Amavis-new was no problem other than having to manually restart SpamAssasin and ClamAV, however, the upgrade to MySQL changed the my.cnf (/etc/mysql/my.cnf) config file for mysql and seemingly turned on binary logging.

I was happy that the upgrade had gone ok and proceeded to install pSpell and work on the project I was working on when the server became sluggish and unresponsive.

After looking I found that the server was out of space, after and investigation I found that the /var/logs/mysql/ folder was huge with many log files of 100mb and over.

After looking at the my.cnf file I found that the binary logging lines were uncommented:

# WARNING: Using expire_logs_days without bin_log crashes the server! See README.Debian!
expire_logs_days       = 10
max_binlog_size         = 100M
binlog_do_db           = include_database_name
binlog_ignore_db       = include_database_name

So I commended out those lines and restarted mysql and after deleting 64Gb of Log files (created in a 2 hour period!) the server was back.

I will in future pay more attention to these upgrades. I have said this before but this is the very place that opensource software falls down. As a web host who runs several servers with many websites on each all earning money, I can not afford to have those servers go down.

If one can not rely on those updates to leave a perfectly working well configured server still working after the update one has to consider if this is the best OS to be using to host sites of any importance what  so ever.

When the open source community comes to the realization that the software that they create is relied upon by real people making real money and running real projects and it is not just some form of geeks project to see if we can make it work, and it pays more attention to its user base and ensuring continuity of the software then I am sure that open source of all forms will dominate the market, until such time one has to consider what is best for your business.

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The coe in question is fairly simple, and what it does is search all your posted content for the string ‘wordpress’ and ensures that it is in the ‘correct’ format with a capital W and capital P.

This code was applied by change set 14996 which includes the new function as seen below:

 /** 
* Forever eliminate “WordPress” from the planet (or at least the little bit we can influence). 
* 
* Violating our coding standards for a good function name. 
* 
* @since 3.0.0 
*/ 
function capital_P_dangit( $text ) { 
return str_replace( ‘WordPress’, ‘WordPress’, $text ); 

The comments added to that function speaks volumes. It is rather ironic that from someone who preaches open source and allowing users to freely do what ever they wish with software and although it it a very minor point I do not see why they should insist that wordpress is written in the ‘correct’ format.

Matt Mullenweg claims that this small piece of code will not have any impact on users what-so-ever, however, it is clear that he is wrong. I have had the situation today where an apparent bug with a link cloaking script in my WordPress Datafeed Import Plugin was indeed this silly little function messing up the URLS. I have a test area on my server where I install many versions of WordPress so that I can test my scripts and plugins. These are all within a folder called WordPress all in lowercase. When the masked urls are created wordpress finds the wordpress string and changes the case. This in turn breaks the link as Linux platforms are case sensative.

Since I found this and doing a little more digging, I have found that there are reports of people having problems with images named WordPress and indeed others who have their wordpress install in a wordpress folder, find that any internal links in their site will no-longer work.

I really do not understand this position, yes if this is the way that Matt Mullenweg origionally intended WordPress to be written it must be frustrating to see it written otherwise.  However, it does not make any different for SEO, Google is not case sennsative. I agree that they should control the image and the wordpress logo, however, when it is text in a blog post like this, and you subscribe to the full ethos of open source software then this sort of tinkering and forcing the hand of the blogger is simply out of order.

Install the Remove WordPress to WordPress filter which will disable this silly little function…

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If you remember I was discussing the media that we kept, digital video of our Daughter growing up, priceless material and the problems I had of backing up the large amounts of data that this had become. My preferred option is Amazon S3, yes there is a small cost involved, but I currently backup all my digital photographs, web servers, email servers, project files, accounts and more to Amazon S3. I would like to keep all my backups in the same place, so that if the worse comes to the worse I can always recover those priceless memories.

Cloudberry online backup as its name suggests is a Windows application that runs backups. It supports Amazon S3, Dunkel and Walrun backup services. I am of course only interested in the Amazon S3 part, but i do intend to checkout the other two as I have never heard of them. Cloudberry online backup costs $29.99 (about £15 ish) so not costly at all if it makes life a little easier and makes me able to secure all my data.

The install process works exactly as you would expect, a simple wizard takes you through the install process, and the download of the application was fairly small, just a couple of megabytes from memory, so even on my poor Internet connection no problems there.

I installed it on my Windows 7 Media centre, which is where all my media is kept and within 2  minutes I had a backup running, so very simple to use.

When you first open Cloudberry online backup, it shows you a welcome screen, which asks you what you want to do, backup wizard or recovery wizard. After adding in your security credentials for Amazon S3, as described above, creating a backup plan is as simple as following the wizard.  Once you have plans created, you can click on the tabbed interface to manage those backups and check their status. A history panel tells you the details of what has been going on, and on the welcome page it shows the progress of any active backups or when the next one is scheduled to run.

The backup wizard takes you through a series of questions asking you what you want to backup, you simply tick the folders and then choose some more options for if you want to compress the files or not, and in the case of Amazon S3 how many versions of each file do you want to keep. This means that you can recover past versions of changed files if you like. As my Media generally stays the same, I have saved cost on the backup storage and chosen to only keep one copy of each file which should be good enough for my needs, however if I start to use this application for other uses, backup of project files for example I may choose to keep many versions of files.

My First backup plan was for digital media, I chose some videos from our latest holidays, a folder of about 3.3Gb and Apart from the speed, which is my poor broadband (I live in Hull where the only broadband supplier is Karoo who are about 2 or 3 years behind the rest of the country, I get 6Mbs down and 200k up, and at peak times it just grinds to a halt) it seems to be working file, it is still backing up as we speak! It is going to take some time to backup the 100Gb+ that I have!

The system has a built in alerts system, you can choose an email address to have it send alerts to, these alerts can be simply if it encounters a problem, or if you are like me, you will want emails when it completes backups as well so you can monitor the progress.

As I say it has not completed its backup plan yet simply because of the size and the speed of my broadband, however, the files it has backed up to Amazon seem to be fine.

The software also optionally allows you to encrypt your files. I am not sure what type of encryption it uses and would think that this would mean that you have to use the cloudberry software to recover from any disaster, not that this is a problem, it has recovery wizards built into the software so that you can recover files as easily as you back them up. I chose not to encrypt as I like to have access to those files from other Amazon S3 clients such as the Firefox plugin and S3Sync.

A very useful feature is that you can choose to filter what files are backed up, so once you have chosen the folders you want to backup you can further refine that backup by either including or excluding files of a particular type, so in my case I have some log files which I do not want backing up as these just take up space so I exclude log files.

There were a couple of features that I would have liked to see.

Firstly you cant define where to back it up to in your S3 buckets, it just creates folders of the computer name, and then replicates the folder structure on your drive. This is perfectly ok for most scenarios and exactly what you want as a home user, just tick the boxes against what you want backing up and leave the software to it. However it would be nice to have an advanced option so that you can define where the files will be backed up to, so if like me you like to keep your Amazon S3 organized to suit you then the software could follow your choice.

Just to reiterate, the way it works now is fine for 99% of people, I always like that extra little bit of control.

The only other issue I found was that you cant schedule a backup plan that has items from networked drives in it, I run a NAS drive which I currently backup via S3Sync on Linux Command line, however this is difficult to maintain, I would have liked to move all my backups across to Cloudberry, and have the one machine (my media centre) running all the backups to Amazon S3. The software will do the backups but strangely you cant schedule regular backups if you have a networked drive included in the plan.

As a software designer and developer myself I understand the logic here, a network drive may not always exist, and as such it a backup tried to run where the drive was not there this would cause problems, however, perhaps this could be handled with a check to see if the drive was available before the backup started and email the alerts email address if it was not.

I have not yet tried the recovery wizard, but I expect that it is very much like the backup wizard. Recovery will be quicker as the way broadband works you have a far greater download bandwidth than upload bandwidth.

Would I recommend Cloudberry online backup? In a word Yes. Very simple to use, some great features even taking into account that I always want more! If it could do scheduled backups from network drives and also let you choose where in your Amazon Bucket you wanted it to backup to I would not be able to fault it, but as I say for most users these features would not be a necessity.

I have also noticed that on their website they have a coming soon section and they plan to add FTP support, I assume this means that you will be able to backup via FTP. They also have planned Storage cost estimates, which will be good when you select a folder with 100Gb of Data in it like I am about to do, to be able to know how much it will cost you before you start would be perfect.

You can get Cloudberry online backup by clicking here

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As you will have recently ready I am backing up all my media to Amazon S3. My photographs are stored on my Western Digital MyBook World which I have hacked to open up the Linux shell, and as such i use S3Sync on command line to back up my photographs. I have even written a bash script that does it as it backs up some other stuff as well.

The rest of the media is on an external drive on the Windows 7 media centre, I am looking for a decent app that will sit there and sync the videos from my digicam to Amazon S3. I have tried loads but they all seem to fall short, either they are buggy and do not work or they can not sync and just manage adhoc single transfers.

I need something that is automated that will sync once a day/week and any changes or new videos will be uploaded to Amazon.

If anyone can recommend any applications free or otherwise?

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In the technical circles there are many that continually bash the big commercial software companies, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and so on for producing software that contains bugs and security flaws and to some extent rightly so, in an ideal world software that is released should be perfect, however, this is almost impossible to achieve.

I am recently recovering one of my servers for another hack, and as you may have gathered from the subject of this post, this server was not a Windows server but a Debian Linux software. While trawling through the logs trying to find how and where they got in, I started to think, I have four dedicated servers, two Microsoft (windows 2000 and windows 2003) and two Linux (Debian and Ubuntu 8.x), and you know what, the Linux boxes have been hacked more times than I care to count and to date the windows boxes have never been hacked, they have been subjected to a denial of service attack (DOS) but never actually hacked.

This is not due to the use of the servers either; all my servers are used for similar things, indeed the windows boxes host more websites in total than the Linux ones.

You are going to come back and tell me that with the move to Ubuntu, Debian is no longer recommended or being actively developed, and that Ubuntu 8.x is old, and you would be completely right, however, Windows 2000 is 10 years old, much older than the version of Debian I am using and is in much the same situation. One can not be expected to move hundreds of websites simply to upgrade from a distro that the open source community has chosen to drop.

As a project manager on a large software development project (circa £3 million) I know very well the problems faced by software companies in producing fault free software. The amount of times that we have released a new version of our software only to find that a change to feature Z has actually broken something in feature A that we developed 3 years ago. It is the inherent problem with large software projects, to maintain the balance between testing and actually getting to the software released.

Risk management is key, we operate a system where the company critical aspects of the software have more rigorous testing than those within the bells and whistles functions that if broken would not jeopardies the running of the company.

I therefore recognise the difficulties faced by both software companies and the open source community; however, in our little software development team we have to answer to the company board as to why we have released buggy software, fortunately for us our Managing Director understands these difficulties.

Open source software has no commercial liability

Open source software has no commercial liability to keep it in check, by this I mean that the large software companies such as Microsoft have a commercial standing to maintain, share holders to answer to and balance sheets to tally. If they release bad software, all that is put into jeopardy, their commercial standing is damaged and as such they will do everything in their power to ensure that their software is as faultless as possible, and when faults are found that they patch them.

Open source software has no such commercial checks to keep it in line, and the very nature of community development results in a free for all in development with no management or corporate responsibility keeping it in check. This results in software that maybe fantastically feature rich and cleaver but just does not deliver the secure and stable environment now let alone in the future when the community chooses at a whim to drop that particular distro.

As both an web master and web host security is the most important aspect of my business. Down time for servers costs money, I am therefore considering my strategic position at this time.

It is something that I have often said, open source is not free, and perhaps the cost of the windows server license is actually worth it in comparison to the cost of the down time.

Simply because it is free just does not cut it anymore, if Linux and open source are to get to the standing that they want to, if they are to take a larger proportion of the desktop market, if they are to continue to establish themselves in the web hosting and server industries they need to become rather more commercially aware and commercially structures to deliver the stable secure systems that corporations and business require.

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The whole PC ground to a halt, task manager showed Virtualbox was using 100% of the CPU constantly.

I managed to get back onto the Virtualbox and cancel the upgrade which then released the CPU. However after repeating the upgrade the same thing happened.

Doing the same on the Virtual Debian works fine…

Very strange… Anyone else had any similar problems?

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The Desktop PC I am running is relatively old, Pentium 4 1.8Ghz with 3Gb of RAM.

I have the following running in Virtualbox

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Windows 7 Beta (more of that later)
• Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop
• Ubuntu 8.10 Server
• Debian 4
• Debian 4 with ISPConfig Installed (again more of that later)
• Ubuntu Studio.

I have been trying to get Mac OSX working, which apparently is possible, but as yet I have had no luck.

I want to get Windows 2003 Server up and running as this will then replicate my windows server.

The main idea behind this is so that I have have environments that I can test things in before implementing on my live servers. I have been playing with ISPConfig on a virtual environment to see if there is any mileage with utilizing it. It looks promising.

The main advantage of virtualisation is that firstly you are in an enclosed, non-live environment thus no real harm can be done, and secondly if a mistake is made you can roll back to a saved point in time. It also allows me to save a copy of a basic Ubuntu or Debian setup and quickly create environments from it, meaning that testing things like ISPConfig can be done easily.

In addition to testing software, I have environments setup that are exactly the same as my live web servers, each with a copy of any websites deployed on them, allowing me to check any changes work on the most critical sites before releasing them to the live server.

I would like to be able to ‘mirror’ at least my Linux server to a virtual environment, probably on a day-by-day basis using the rsync’d archive backup.

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mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime-old

Create a symbolic link the timezone you want from /usr/share/zoneinfo to /etc/localtime.

For example:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London /etc/localtime

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