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 ...

IP Based Firewall with cPanel

CPanel/WHM Based Systems If you are using a web server from a web hosting company, chances are the CPanel/WHM is the system admin interface you use to manage your server. The current revision of CPanel/WHM (Mar 5th, 2008) appears to rely on the host access file as a method of preventing access to the system. Access to iptables or ipchains rules is not readily apparent, however it is possible that we have overlooked these options. Blocking An IP Range The steps below will help you research who is connecting to your box and how to block them from gaining access to your system through software based IP blocking. Real World Example This implementation is based on our experiences after turning on the Logwatch utility on our web server. The logwatch report for PAM shows sshd authentication failures. From our most recent report: --------------------- pam_unix Begin ------------------------ sshd: Authentication Failures: ...