A Journey of images

If you are experiencing a problem with your webserver running slow or think you might have a dos attack on your hands, here is a trick i use to make sure i block any suspisious IP’s.

I use 2 packages on my Ubuntu server to have a look at what is going on.

Iftop easily obtained with

apt-get install iftop

Run it and have a look, it gives you the source ip and ports that are being accessed

 Press P to display ports  and N for DNS resolution

 Personally I prefer it off

 You can lookup any suspicious ip addresses  with ip-lookup.net/ 

Now you will have to look for any suspicious ip addresses that should not be accessing especially SSH and using high volumes of data especially any foreign servers accessing your port 25 (SMTP)

 Setup smtp authentication or block them off with a fire wall rule (see net section)

 If it does not originate from your country or any nabour countries  ones its a safe bet to block it, just ensure not to block the new technologies like the blackberry servers that originate from countries like the UK for  Africa.

 Next up is the all powerful IPTABLES

 Its installed by default on the server

 For a really nice extensive overview visit: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo

 Firstly  How to see if you have any rules on your firewall

 iptables –list

If the very first line reads 

 ACCEPT     all  –  anywhere             anywhere

  You will have to ensure to use the –I  option this writes the rule to the front of the list

 Iptables initializes rules from the top so ACCEPT all –anywhere will result in none of your rules below it working

 To stop a specific range:

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m iprange –src-range 180.0.0.0-180.255.255.255 -j DROP

 to block a specific ip use:

 iptables -I  INPUT -s 180.76.5.0  -j DROP

 and to drop a smtp connecter

 iptables -I  INPUT -s  196.215.3.214 -p smtp –dport 25  -j DROP

Ever installed a apache php5 server on ubuntu only to find that it is prompting you to download the pages instead of viewing them?

Well this is because you web server is not recognizing the .php extension.

To enable libapache2-mod-php

Run

sudo a2enmod php

and force reload with

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

If you receve an error where the server says that the librairy could not be found try running

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Another fix if the problem persists:

cd /etc/apache2 

Go into mods-available, scroll down to php5.conf and php5.load

Copy php5.conf and php5.load to mods-enabled:

cp php5.conf  etc/apache2/mods-enabled

cp php5.load etc/apache2/mods-enabled

After that Restart your Web-server

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Tired of always using http://localhost/mysite ? want it to display mysite.com?

Well same here fellow Apache users.

Brows to your apache folder

>apache>conf>extra

Edit the httpd-vhosts.conf and add the following
(make sure to use the forward slash and not just copy and paste form the clipboard )

NameVirtualHost yourwebsite.com:80
<VirtualHost yourwebsite.com:80>
DocumentRoot C:/root/of/your/site
ServerName yourwebsite.com
</VirtualHost>

Make sure to also add your localhost to ensure your phpmyadmin and other extentions still work.

NameVirtualHost localhost:80
<VirtualHost localhost:80>
DocumentRoot C:/xampplite/htdocs
ServerName localhost.com
</VirtualHost>

Next up on your local drive go to:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

And edit the hosts file to look like this

127.0.0.1  localhost

127.0.0.1  yourwebsite.com

(Note do not define any real website addresses, this is your computers host setup file and will direct all references to the defined domain to the local machine)

Last and not least make sure your appache httpd.conf allows you to view files in the directory by adding

<Directory “C:/root/of/your/site/”>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Note: Do not use any unsafe characters in folder names. If your apache does not start up after the changes, check the folder names for any spaces an spelling mistakes .