Author Archives: akamaras

How to block brute force attacks against wp-login.php on a Cpanel server using CSF

Over the last few years there have been massive brute force attacks against wordpress sites wp-login.php.

A quick search for a way of dealing with these attacks, returned methods that used mod_security to identify the attack and then ban the ip using a firewall. I wanted a simple way to ban the ip without using mod_security. So I wrote a bash script that checks how many attempts to login have been made from each ip, if the times are unusually high then the ip gets temporarily banned using ConfigServer Firewall (csf). The script can be placed in crontab so as to have frequent/automated checks. Read more »

Nagios – check_rbl – No output returned from plugin

Posted by akamaras on 27/08/2013 4 comments

Recently I faced problems setting up check_rbl v1.3.0 plugin at my nagios 3.4.1. From the gui the state of the check would turn to UNKNOWN and the Status Information would return “No output returned from plugin”

1 bad minute errors in crontab file can’t install

Posted by akamaras on 12/07/2012 No comments

I had multiple cases where cpanel accounts were getting the error message in the title, when users were trying to save a cronjob. All of these accounts were previously transferred from plesk servers.

To fix this just enter the users crontab from cli by issuing Read more »

Captcha for virtuemart product inquiry to avoid spam

Posted by akamaras on 16/06/2012 No comments

This how to has been successfully implemented on Joomla 1.5.26 and Virtuemart 1.1.9. It will show you how to place an easy to use captcha for virtuemart product inquiry. If you want to add extra security, you can use reCaptcha following the instructions from virtuemart forums, by clicking on the following link. Read more »

Linux script to check if your hard disk is nearly full

Posted by akamaras on 06/02/2012 6 comments

Here is a simple script that will check if your specified partition is almost full and will notify you if it is. In order to have an email send, you must have mailx installed, for installation check my post here.

ro.me

Posted by akamaras on 22/01/2012 No comments

ok, this must be the most impresive web-site I’ve ever seen.

Technologies being used among others are webGL, html5 & java scripts

Howto backup cpanel via rsync

Posted by akamaras on 06/01/2012 14 comments

Cpanel has a nice backup system especially in case you’ll have to restore the server. What I don’t like about it is the absence of ssh as a protocol to transfer the data to a remote server. There are two ways to backup to a remote server :

script to place webalizer stats outside cpanel

Posted by akamaras on 06/01/2012 No comments

Here is a script I made for my cpanel servers, to place webalizer stats outside cpanel. Users will be able to goto http://www.mydomain.com/stats and see their webstats.

NOTE: This script is for the server administrator, if you have a cpanel account you can do the procces manually (a google search will return lots of howtos).

Linux server info script

Posted by akamaras on 28/11/2011 64 comments

Here is a script that will quickly provide you information about your linux server such as cpu model, frequency, number of cores, amount of ram & swap, system uptime and test server download & I/O speed

cpu, ram and system uptime info are taken from “/proc/cpuinfo” , “free” and “uptime” respectively

download speed is measured by downloading a test file from cachefly, while I/O speed is measured by creating a 1GB file from null characters (/dev/zero)

linux script to check if a service is running and start it, if it’s stopped

Posted by akamaras on 09/11/2011 103 comments

Here is a simple script that will check if your specified service is running and will start it if it’s stopped.

You will have to replace “replace_me_with_a_valid_service” with the name of the service you want to check

akamaras

Yet another blog