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Brute force SSH protection
We have implemented some brute force SSH attack protection on VMs. Your servers should start to receive fewer connections from bots trying to bruteforce crack passwords on your server user accounts. Behind the scenes we have setup honey trap servers. Botnets with no good reason to connect to these servers attempt to connect to the…
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Linux.conf.au – LCA2014 Perth visit (Part 1)
Recently i started talking to an amazing bunch of people, who had proposed, and been accepted to host the next Linux.conf.au in Auckland, New Zealand. I immediately requested to help, and be a part since i really love this sort of thing, and i want to give back. Since the whole idea was still very…
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Blocking malicious crawlers or scrapers in Apache
Occasionally we see a customer who has a popular website that often gets people trying to crawl it and copy the lot, This has the unfortunate side effect that its hammering the site. Made worse only by dynamic pages and loops this can literally take down a server in some occasions. Often you can slow…
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Storage Clustering Part 2: GlusterFS
GlusterFS is an interesting solution for providing redundant network attached storage clusters. Some features include… trivially easy for basic setups supports virtually any file-system no need to mess with kernels can work across commodity network hardware suitable for enterprise deployment has commercial support available GlusterFS can scale well also, its simple configuration based storage is…
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Easy IP failover (Debian squeeze)
Say you have a bunch of servers on a fast private network, running a busy web site. And you need a gateway server so you can reach those from the outside world. You might run a proxy on a gateway server to expose that. However there could be a problem accessing your site if that…
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Formatting problems and Syntax Highlighting in wordpress
As you may have realized, we use wordpress on our blog. Its simple and easy and nice to use, however it doesnt come without its oddities which can be a pain in the butt for a technical blog. — being translated into em-dash When doing firewall scripts or shell scripts you often use the double…
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apache modules to help keep your system steady
libapache2-mod-bw – bandwidth limiting module This module allows you to limit bandwidth usage on every virtual host or directory or to restrict the number of simultaneous connections. The bandwidth control, for example, can be configured according to the criteria: origin of the connection, file extension, file size or user agent of the client. Example: LoadModule…
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David’s Handy Scripts – bandwidth usage – disk usage
I thought a useful addition to our blog might be a running series of handy scripts. Just for the sake of things (and because I couldn’t find a better title), I’m calling the series “David’s Handy Scripts”. I’ll get this show on the road with a quick script I put together to track 2 things…
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Introduction to the new Linux Sysadmin
Recently we have had a few support requests come through from people who are new to Linux, and are unsure how to maintain a server at all. Package Management If your Linux distro is RedHat based (ie Centos, , then you will be using yum and RPM. RPM is for doing individual package manipulation (installing,…