Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim to render a server or network resource unavailable, overwhelming it with a flood of traffic. This can cause serious problems for websites and …
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The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially known as Apache, is one of the most widely-used web server software. It is open-source and has been a favorite for many system administrators …
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The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache, is one of the most widely used web servers around the world. It provides many powerful features, including dynamically loadable …
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Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim to render a server or network resource unavailable, overwhelming it with a flood of traffic. This can cause serious problems for websites and …
Read More
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim to render a server or network resource unavailable, overwhelming it with a flood of traffic. This can cause serious problems for websites and …
Read More
Scalp! is a log analyzer for the Apache web server that looks for security problems. It reads the Apache log and perform log analysis for possible attacks against rulesets provided by PHP-IDS project. It is available for download from GitHub.
Scalp! is currently written in Python though the writer claims he’s now working on C++ version of it. Current Python can only analyze a maximum of 10000 lines of log, and seems to be a bit slow. The C++ version is aimed to overcome the problems.
When being run without any parameters, Scalp will look for access_log and default_filter.xml files in the current directory, and produce the report to the standard output. access_log is the Apache log file, and default_filter.xml is the filter rules available from the PHPIDS project. Running the program as the following will use the Apache log file at /var/log/apache2/access.log and the PHPIDS ruleset from ~/default_filter.xml;
$ python scalp.py --log /var/log/apache2/access.log --filters ~/default_filter.xml
To overcome the 10000 lines limitation of the program, a Linux program called split can be run as in the example below as a log splitter, and Scalp! is then run against all the splitted log;
$ split -l 10000 /var/log/apache2/access.log
Git is a by far the most widely used distributed version control system while being free and open source.
Despite the popularity, it’s not installed by default in Ubuntu. You can install the program by following these steps;
apt‘s package list
$ sudo apt -y update
git-core package
$ sudo apt -y install git-core
git from the command line
$ git
usage: git [--version] [--help] [-C <path>] [-c name=value]
[--exec-path[=<path>]] [--html-path] [--man-path] [--info-path]
[-p | --paginate | --no-pager] [--no-replace-objects] [--bare]
[--git-dir=<path>] [--work-tree=<path>] [--namespace=<name>]
<command> [<args>]
These are common Git commands used in various situations:
start a working area (see also: git help tutorial)
clone Clone a repository into a new directory
init Create an empty Git repository or reinitialize an existing one
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If you prefer to use GUI-based Git client, you can choose any of the following packages to install via apt;
Ubuntu does not come with SSH server installed by default but could be installed and enabled easily with the following steps from the comand line;
sudo apt -y update
openssh-server package.
sudo apt install -y openssh-server
sshd server is running.
sudo systemctl status ssh
sshd from running by default during system bootup.
sudo systemctl disable ssh
sshd could be re-enabled at later times.
sudo systemctl enable ssh
rar is a proprietary file format for file archival and developed by WinRAR. It provides Winrar to extract rar files in Windows and unrar for Linux.
SMART or Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology is used to monitor the hard drives for reliability. Hard drive’s failure can be anticipated and appropriate action can be taken before the hard drive fail completely.
To check your hard drive’s health status in Linux, the tool smartctl can be used. It is available in the smartmontools package, and in Ubuntu running the command at the terminal will install the package
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
Assuming your hard drive is /dev/sda, running the following command will return the SMART’s health status of your hard drive
sudo smartctl -H /dev/sda
A healthy hard drive will return the following output
smartctl 5.40 2010-03-16 r3077 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
The following is an example output of a problematic hard drive
smartctl 5.40 2010-03-16 r3077 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net Log Sense failed, IE page [scsi response fails sanity test]
