Red Hat, Fedora openssh security compromise

Many of you may have already read the news, but for those of you that have not here is a recap. But first, let me state that we have tested all of our customer’s servers, and none have been compromised.
An email was sent to the fedora-announce mailing list, it started with, “Last week [...]

Extracting files from rpm and deb packages

We ran into an issue where an init script was missing and we needed to restore the file.  The backup (of course) did not include the file we needed.  We had to download the package, extract the contents, and move the init script back into place.  Below are the commands used:
DEB:
$ dpkg-deb -x <package.deb> /restore/dir
RPM:
$ [...]

IXOS HDSK Migration

MNX Solutions works on many UNIX based systems, one of which is IXOS (now called OpenText).
We needed to migrate from WORM (9.1GB) media to a hard disk based configuration for performance, scalability and disaster recovery purposes. Below is the high level procedure I used during the migration to migrate from WORM to HDSK, on IXOS [...]

Zimbra – Pop before smtp authentication howto

We had a client with 3000+ named users, and each of them were configured without authentication for smtp relaying, the qmail/vpopmail system they were migrating from had “pop before smtp” authentication. Well, we wanted to have as little disruption as possible for the migration so we needed to enable this same feature in [...]

cPanel / Fantastico Deluxe install doesn't do anything.

We ran into an issue when installing Fantastico. After clicking the installation button, everything seemed to download just fine, but every time you go back to the Fantastico link it says it is not installed.
It turns out, Fantastico uses wget to download files. wget is called with the ‘-P’ option, which is not [...]

Netdump, figuring out what caused that system crash

We have all been there before. Your server crashed, nothing indicates what happened. You check /var/log/messages and all you see is.. well.. nothing. With no sign of what happened, or indication of why it happened you are left to.. wait until it happens again.
On Red Hat based systems, you have an answer. [...]

Dedicated Linux Server Checklist for the New Year.

If you have a dedicated Linux server, this list is for you. Below are a few items you need to do, to ensure your 2008 will be a bit brighter.  This list is by no means comprehensive, but hopefully gets you started in the right direction this year.

Check your backups and perform a [...]

Restoring Plesk, new drive, old disk still available on same system.

Here was the scenario I faced. RHEL4 machine will not boot (according to data center), receives various library not found errors on bootup (Later, I found these errors were from an intruder who tried to install a rootkit, and it didn’t go so well. Most of /bin was corrupt).
The data center recommends that the [...]

YUM issue: TypeError: Parsing primary.xml error

When running a ‘yum check-update’, I would receive an error. The error continued even after running ‘yum clean all’.
The error is shown below:
# yum check-update
Setting up repositories
core 100% |=========================| 1.1 kB [...]

Securing your Linux server

We deal with security related issues nearly every day. Many of these issues could be prevented with a few minor changes to php.ini along with the installation of mod_security. It is simply amazing how many machines are hacked, and then used for the sole purpose of sending spam, denial of service (DoS) attacks or [...]