Tag Archives: admin

Pick a language, any half dozen will do

Part of being in the IT industry, and the internet sector in particular, is constant learning and keeping up with relevant technologies.
I found that out the hard way, spending the first 4 years of my first full-time job working on a system that was proprietary all the way from the code we wrote to the [...]

SVN + ZSH: moving all files into a directory

Let’s suppose I have a directory, foo, which contains a whole bunch of stuff (files, links, other directories) all under version control with SVN. In my case these represent a website.
I decide that I want to organize this mess, creating a new directory in the project’s root (let’s call it bar, as tradition dictates), then [...]

WLAN monitoring

If you plan to listen to your WLAN, a little setup will be required. The WLAN card has to be put into monitor and promiscuous modes to listen to all traffic, then given the correct channel to listen on.
Assuming the interface is not already in use:
sudo su -
ifconfig eth1 promisc
iwconfig eth1 mode monitor
iwconfig eth1 channel [...]

Secure your SSHd

Every day our webserver’s logfiles were stuffed with failed SSH logins - long lists of random usernames and repeat attempts to brute-force the root account.
The invalid logins are a minor nuisance, but it just feels wrong to let these little script kiddies keep on knocking at the door anyway. The attempts on root, or where [...]

How not to be a spam relay - avoiding contact form email injection attacks

The last couple of evenings we received a handful of odd-looking messages sent through our contact form which were attempting to use email injection techniques to relay mail through us.

Carpe Domainum! (or, How my domain was moved from UK2.net)

Control of paulglover.net has been torn from the grasp of UK2.net! The domain is now fully under my control as of March 20th 2006, and transferred to GoDaddy.com today.
Here’s how I did it, for those who might want to try the same. This is for a .net, registered through Joker in 2000. If you have [...]