18 November 2011 ~ 0 Comments

Graphing SSH dictionary attacks with HighCharts

TweetAfter my 10-year-old basement Linux server died this week from a power outage, I took the sad step of giving up on it. It’s died before and I’ve patched it back together with a new power supply here or an addon PCI SATA card there, but I finally decided to throw in the towel since [...]

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20 September 2011 ~ 3 Comments

Making sure SSLv2 is disabled in Apache (and Nginx)

Tweet Edit Jan 24, 2012: Deleted all the crap from this story and just left the recommended Apache and Nginx SSL cipher suites for maximum security without SSLv2 and without BEAST vulnerability (at least according to Qualys). Apache httpd SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1 SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM; SSLHonorCipherOrder on nginx ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:AES256-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; [...]

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04 October 2010 ~ 7 Comments

The Barracuda Spam Firewall VMware Appliance (Vx) finally exists!

TweetWhen I started at my current company, spam was handled with a separate server running SpamAssassin and a few other services. This sort of got the job done but required babysitting. I wasn’t part of the Sysadmin team at that point but I know they had to restart SpamAssassin relatively frequently, manually clear out the [...]

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30 March 2010 ~ 0 Comments

Passwordless SSH Everywhere

TweetI’ve known about ssh keys for a long time and frequently use them, most frequently so that a script can transfer a file between two servers without having to do some mumbo-jumbo where I try to pipe a password into it or some other wacky thing. I hadn’t fully embraced ssh keys, though, because I [...]

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