To install IonCube loading in cPanel, run the following as root:

# /scripts/phpextensionmgr install IonCubeLoader

You can then check if ionCube was installed by running:

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The Center for Internet Security  has a great list of security configuration and audit guidelines.

A great resource comprised of 40+ consensus Security Configuration Benchmarks for Operating Systems, Middleware, Software Applications and Network Devices.

The Benchmarks are:

• Recommended technical control rules/values for hardening operating systems, middleware and software applications, and network devices;
• Unique, because the recommendations are defined via consensus among hundreds of security professionals worldwide;
• Downloaded approximately 1 million times per year;
• Distributed freely by CIS in .PDF format (some are available to CIS Members only in XML format via the CIS Members web site);
• Used by thousands of enterprises as the basis for security configuration policies and the de facto standard against which to compare them.

Visit the benchmark/tools page to download your copy.

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Here is a simple few liner password generator written in compact python.


import string as s; from random import choice as c
x=10; print ''.join([c(s.letters + s.digits) for i in range(x)])



# python pw.py
Bz7DKuzqCL


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“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers”, according to to Amazon.

All EC2 instances are sold based on hourly usage and instance type.  Each instances type consists of a certain number of EC2 Compute Units (ECU) and a set RAM size. One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.  Since the ECU is such a vague definition, I wanted to see some benchmarks (but couldn’t find any).

The information below is completly CPU based (using the Python Pystone test), and does not take into account any other factors.

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LOCK TABLES and SELECT are the minimal requirements to use ‘mysqldump’.

You can use the following grant statement to create a user with as little privileges as possible: Read the rest of this entry »

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When working with CUPS using remote print queues, you may find that the remote printer is not always available, has timed out, ran out of paper, has a paper jam, etc. Sometimes this causes a job to ‘not-complete’ and when running ‘lpstat -o’, you see old print jobs.

We put together a quick script to auto-purge these jobs.  Hopefully this helps someone in the future.

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We have been working on a project for a customer to upgrade the kernel, PowerPath, OCFS2 and other operating system patches.  The project was interesting as no single source of information existed on the appropriate process.

The procedure issue comes in because OCFS2 relies on seeing the disks which PowerPath presents.  PowerPath and OCFS2 are reliant on a particular kernel version to work properly.  With all of the inter-dependencies,  which should be done and in what order was the question. To top it off, this was also running a RHEL cluster and another instance running Oracle RAC.

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