Networking Utilities
HTTP Errors When Uploading/Connecting in WordPress
Having problems browsing themes, uploading plug-ins, or doing just about anything that "talks" to the outside world via Wordpress? We have had a development server buried deep in our network behind several routers and firewalls that had a similar problem. Whenever we'd log into the dashboard we'd get various timeout error messages on each of the news sections. We'd not get our automatic update messages whenever there was a plugin update or a Wordpress update (3.0 is coming soon!). Well it turns out that we needed to fix 2 things to help speed up the network connection. Fix #1 - DNS Resolution We run this particular development box on Linux. That meant updating our /etc/resolv.conf file to talk directly to the DNS servers. If you use DHCP configuration or go through a router this file is often ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,PHP,System Administration,Wordpress,applications,blog
June 03, 2010
Upgrading Logwatch on CentOS 5
Introduction I finally got tired at looking at the thousand-plus line daily reports coming to my inbox from Logwatch every evening. Don't get me wrong, I love logwatch. It helps me keep an eye on my servers without having to scrutinize every log file. If you aren't using logwatch on your Linux boxes I strongly suggest you look into it and turn on this very valuable service. Most Linux distros come with this pre-installed. The problem is that on CentOS the version of logwatch that comes with the system was last updated in 2006. The logwatch project itself, however, was updated just a few months ago. As of this writing the version running on CentOS 5 is 7.3 (released 03/24/06) and the version on the logwatch SourceForge site is 7.3.6 (updated March 2010). In this latest version there are a log of nice updates to the scripts that ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,Security,System Administration,Tips & Tricks,applications,blog
May 31, 2010
Setting Up Stunnel On Linux
Intro This article was written while getting SMTP authentication working with AT&T Business Class DSL services. The SMTP service requires authentication via a secure connection on port 465. Other articles will get into further details, this article's focus is on the stunnel part of the equation, which we use to wrap the standard sendmail/SMTP configuration. In This Article An example stunnel config file for talking to AT&T SMTP servers on port 465 (SMTPS) Testing the connection to AT&T SMTPS is working via telnet Getting stunnel running on system boot. Our Environment CentOS release 5.2 stunnel 4.15-2 We assume you have stunnel and telnet installed. If not, research the yum install commands for CentOS. You will also need superuser access to update the running services on your box. Setting up stunnel Stunnel will allow you to listen for data connections on a local port and redirect that traffic through an SSH wrapper to another system. In our case we are using ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,applications,blog
April 05, 2010
SFTP Tips & Tricks
Using Keyfiles To Access SFTP Services You can use the private key .pem files to allow you to connect via SFTP on a server that only allows key access. The trick is to get the .pem file that Amazon gives you onto the sever that you will be using to connect to the EC2 instance. When you store the .pem file on the local box, you will need to ensure the security level is set to 500 (r-x------). Here is an example: # sftp -o IdentityFile=my-amazon-given-key.pem root@domU-11-22-33-00-CC-11 We often use this trick to talk to our Amazon EC2 instances as they do not allow password based authentication by default. This is a good security mechanism as only people with an authorized key file can gain access. It also gives you a quick an easy way to shut down all access keys by disabling a single key file, essentially shutting down access from an entire group ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,SSH,Security,Tips & Tricks,blog
December 09, 2009
