Monthly Archives: December 2011

Protecting WordPress from script fishing attacks with Fail2Ban

A better, but slightly more complex, solution has been posted here Because WordPress redirects all incoming requests and serves dedicated 404 pages, nothing ends up in the Apache error.log. and so, The standard Fail2Ban filter apache-noscript.conf won’t work. So here’s …

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Fail2Ban with sendEmail Python MTA and SMTP

The servers I administer are on Amazon cloud, and there are often problems with outgoing emails and sendmail, so for a quick fix to add outgoing email support to scripts, I’m okay with using sendEmail, a small Python SMTP email …

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Fail2Ban Error – Iptables returned 200

This relates to seeing things like this in /var/log/fail2ban.log when restarting the fail2ban service: 2011-12-21 23:06:03,471 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR iptables -D INPUT -p tcp -m multiport –dports http,https -j fail2ban-apache-wordpress-login iptables -F fail2ban-apache-wordpress-login iptables -X fail2ban-apache-wordpress-login returned 200 The very simple …

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Protecting Apache webservers from WordPress admin login dictionary attacks with fail2ban

A better solution has been posted here but I’ll leave this post up too. A very popular webserver I administer has been getting more attention from the script kiddies, and the Apache access log has been filling up with repeated …

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Screenshots with Awesome WM and xsnap

One thing I really, really liked about Compiz was the ability to hold down CTRL, drag the mouse over part of the screen, and take a screenshot. Sadly I discovered this about a week before it broke in 11.04 – …

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Awesome WM config tweaks

I use Awesome WM which has made a splendid alternative to Gnome/Unity since soon after this was unleashed in Ubuntu 11.04. Not only did I find Unity to be dog-slow, I was finding windows were getting in the way more …

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Using a config file with SSH

I found this to be very much worth doing once I started spending a fair amount of time SSHing into different remote systems on a regular basis. So now I have about 18 of these for personal, and client, servers. …

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A few helpful Bash settings and aliases

I’m constantly trying to get my hands off the mouse and onto the keyboard so I’ve been looking for tweaks and tricks to help me to do what I need to do with fewer mouse clicks and keystrokes. I’ve been …

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Separating source code from web root with PHP and NetBeans

I recently tidied my server filesystem and ended up making webroot a little more secure by keeping all of my source out of there, and having nothing that I edit directly in place. Mainly this was done to avoid duplication …

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WordPress upload/upgrade permissions with group ownership

I have to maintain a few WP blogs for clients. It’s not a package I overly enjoy working with. Sure, it does the job pretty well and is hugely popular, But there is something about it that I just find …

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