Update all php extensions at once with YUM

With YUM, upgrading php is simple as “yum install php”. This will install latest php version on your machine. But if you have multi different php modules that aren’t part of php package (eg. gd, mysqli …), than you can use this simple one liner and install all those modules at once.

Just run this as root:

php -m | grep -v "Modules" | while read i; do yum install php-$i -y; done

This will check for all currently installed php packages and will try to upgrade them.

Magento – lock administration to specific country

Brute force attacks on Magenta administration are also very common issue, like with WordPress, well maybe a little less :). If you can’t lock your administrations on specific fixed IP addresses, than you can probably lock administration so that is accessible only from your country. Russia and China for example, are countries from which those kind of attacks are very common. So it is good idea to block them.

For this example, I’m doing this on Apache 2.4 with GeoIP module installed. Before you proceed, you should have installed geoip.

To have Magento administration accessible only from Germany (for example), add code bellow to your apache vhost configuration. This geoip was installed on CentOS 7, you should change path to GeoIP.dat accordingly to your installation. You should also change country code to the one that you want access from.

GeoIPEnable On
GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} !^DE$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(index.php/)?admin/? [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [R=403,L]

Directadmin/Letsencrypt – Domain does not exist on the system. Unable to find your.hostname.com in /etc/virtual/domainowners

A few days ago I was doing complete migration of old Directadmin server to new Directadmin server which had different hostname. Everything went well but I was unable to register Letsencrypt SSL certificate for new server hostname.

I was getting error like this:

[root@myserver scripts]# ./letsencrypt.sh request my.server.com 4096
Domain does not exist on the system. Unable to find my.server.com in /etc/virtual/domainowners. Exiting...
no valid domain found - exiting

First thing I did is I add new hostname as domain to user admin. Certificate was indeed registered than, but not as server hostname (/usr/local/directadmin/conf/cacert.pem). I deleted domain than.

After a little search I found out that I forgot to change servername variable in directadmin.conf. So I changed it, restart directadmin but I was getting the same error. At the end I found out that the easiest way to fix this is to change hostname in Directadmin administration.

  1. Go to Directadmin as admin user and navigate to Administrator Settings, then set some temporary hostname in Server’s Hostname. Let’s say my.server2.com.
  2. Wait until cron will make changes – you should see new hostname in Administrator Settings when refreshing page.
  3. Go in Administrator Settings again and change Server’s Hostname to your old hostname – my.server.com.
  4. Run letsencrypt.sh again.

This time, certificate was registered successfully.

[root@myserver scripts]# ./letsencrypt.sh request my.server.com 4096
Setting up certificate for a hostname: my.server.com
Generating 4096 bit RSA key for let's encrypt account...
openssl genrsa 4096 > "/usr/local/directadmin/conf/letsencrypt.key"
Generating RSA private key, 4096 bit long modulus
...

[kofi]

malware acl condition: clamd: unable to send file body to socket (127.0.0.1)

If you see error like this in your mail logs, than chances are that your ClamAV is not able to process attachments files larger than limit set in clamav configuration. In this case, sender which sent email with larger attachment to your server, will get something like this in respond:

[10.10.10.10] #<[10.10.10.10] #5.0.0 smtp; 5.4.7 - Delivery expired (message too old) [Default] 451-'Temporary local problem - please try later' (delivery attempts: 75)> #SMTP#

In your mail log you’ll see something like this:

+++ 1e248B-000NMy-T6 has not completed +++
1969-08-15 01:40:21 1e248B-000NMy-T6 malware acl condition: clamd : unable to send file body to socket (127.0.0.1)
1969-08-25 01:40:21 1e248B-000NMy-T6 H=some.hostname.com [1.1.1.1] X=TLSv1:RC4-SHA:128 CV=no F=<prvs=449d2f142=senders@email.com> temporarily rejected after DATA

To solve this, open your clamav.conf file (/etc/clamav.conf or find your location) and change value for StreamMaxLength according to your needs. Default value is 25M.

Don’t forget to restart your ClamAV.

Block bad bots on cPanel globally with Apache

A lot of traffic from bad bots, crawling your sites can cause problems such as high server load and unstable server. You should use mod_security on cPanel servers that should do the job, but if you want to block specific bots globally, on apache level, then bellow solution is for you. This syntax is for Apache version 2.4.

On cPanel servers you can’t just edit httpd.conf file, it will be rewrited. You can edit it through whm easily. Just login on your cpanel -> Apache Configuration -> Include Editor -> go to “Pre Main Include” -> select your apache version (or all versions) -> then insert code bellow and click Update and then restart apache.

In Directory section, you should specify right path to location where websites are. On cpanel servers this is /home by default.

Here is my example:

<Directory "/home">
   SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "MJ12bot" bad_bots
   SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "AhrefsBot" bad_bots
   SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SemrushBot" bad_bots
   SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Baiduspider" bad_bots
  <RequireAll>
     Require all granted
     Require not env bad_bots
  </RequireAll>
</Directory>

Get SSL certificate expiry date quickly and easily with ckcrt script

SSL certificates are daily routine of my work, so there was regular practice to check expiry date of live certificate through Chrome browser -> Developer tools. It is quite time-consuming and annoying work if you have to repeat it. So I made this very simple bash script with which you can check expiry date and some other certificate information quickly, from your terminal. This will work on osx or linux machines. Of corse, you must have OpenSSL installed on your machine in order to use this script.

Continue Reading

Macbook Pro – assign escape to section/paragraph key on OSX Sierra

If I’m honest, this touch bar that new Macbook Pro brings keeps me cold. As system administrator I’m forced to use ESC a lot. This “virtual” escape button on touch bar is annoying as hell. But there is way to make escape button physical again. Sierra brought simple solution to assign escape to caps lock button. Not very good solution in my opinion. I have international keyboard and paragraph/section (§) key is unused – I don’t recall that I ever used section key. So I assigned escape function to section key which is also near to position where escape button used to be, so that makes it even more great.

First I installed this Karabiner-Elements. Then you must create simple rule. I was confused when assigning “From key” because section key wasnt there. It turns out that you have to select non_us_backslash option and then assign “To key” escape.

It should look like this:

I hope that this helps anyone 🙂

Limit xmlrpc.php to only specific web clients

Xmlrpc.php is very common target of attacks. In most cases you don’t need xmlrpc, but if you use third-party apps like WordPress for iPhone or android or other editors, then xmlrpc is the one who communicates between them and your WordPress installation. If you’ll be using it, it can be good idea to limit access to it only from “browsers” that you are using to access it. In case bellow, I’m using iPhone WordPress app.

When access to xmlrpc.php via iphone app, you’ll see that access log looks like this:

[11/Jun/2017:19:45:08 +0200] "POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/2.0" 200 462 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.2.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/14F89 wp-iphone/7.7"

From this you can see that wp-iphone/7.7 is named as client. So this will be our key for nginx configuration. We’ll make rule that will only accept requests to xmlrpc.php from clients containing string “wp-iphone”. Other clients will be denied. This is not bulletproof of as web client can be easily spoofed, but it should block majority of attacks.

location = /xmlrpc.php {
if ($http_user_agent !~* "wp-iphone")
{
return 403;
}
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:<your_php_fpm_port>;
}

WordPress bruteforce protection with NGINX and limit_req / request limitation

WordPress installations are very common targets of brute force attacks. With this attacks, attacker tries countless username and password variations in order to guess login informations. As you can imagine that such abusive behavior on your WordPress can cause collapse of server. Very common are attacks on wp-login.php and xmlrpc.php. There is a simple way to limit allowed number of requests on specific file with limit_req. This module can limit processing rate of requests coming from a single IP address on your web server.

In order to protect your WordPress administration you can do something like this:

# prevent brute force attacks on wp-login.php
 location = /wp-login.php {
        limit_req zone=one burst=5 nodelay;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
 }

This will allow 5 request in 5 second “window”. When there’ll be more than 5 request in 5 seconds, Nginx will return 503 error until request rate slows down:

$ curl -I https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php 
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Server: nginx

Of course, you can use limit_req to protect other systems besides WordPress to.

Directadmin – find all email forwarders on server for specific email account

Here is simple one liner for finding all mail aliases on Directadmin server that are forwarding to your email account – in this example your@email.com. All aliases are saved in files /etc/virtual/<domain_name>/aliases.

[root@directadmin ~]# grep -ri "your@email.com" /etc/virtual/*/aliases | awk -F '/|:' {'print $4 ": " $6 " ->" $7'}
email.com: alias1 -> your@email.com
somedomain.net: sales -> your@email.com,mail2@somedomain.net
anotherdomain.com: chacha -> myaddress@anotherdomain.com,this@email.com,your@email.com
.
.
.

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