What does men with power want? More power!

"What the fuck is this world", sings Eddie Vedder. Indeed, WTF? Having read this blog post about a political dynasty wreaking havoc among the people who they're to supposed to serve just gives you enough heat to boil not just an egg, but basket fulls.

You're a public official, elected by the people and yet you rule like you're god and that the people should fear you. FUCK YOU.

What's worse is that the management of the prestigious (NOT!) Valley Gold and Country Club is not cooperating with authorities. WTF?

We should all visit: http://www.valleygolf.com.ph/temp/feedback.asp and give them a piece of our minds.

Managing Startups for Ubuntu

apt-get install sysv-rc-conf
sysv-rc-conf

Bypassing portaudit

If you're stuck building a port even if you're already upgraded using portmanager, set the environment variable DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES:

setenv DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES 1

and start make install clean again. Reference here.

FreeBSD Package management

To search for packages in ports:

make search name="blahblah"

To search packages related to something:

make search key=id

To search for installed packages

pkg_info -ac

To search for a particular package

pkg_info -xc packagename

To list files installed by a package

pkg_info -xL packagename

To check dependencies of a package

pkg_info -R packagename

4-Step FreeBSD essentials for new installs

1. Update the ports tree
pkg_add -r portsnap
portsnap fetch
portsnap extract
portsnap update

2. Install portaudit & portmanager

pkg_add -r portaudit portmanager

3. Run portaudit to check for vulnerabilities:

portaudit -Fda

4. Upgrade the installed packages

portmanager -u

Notes: to use a proxy & save bandwidth:

setenv FTP_PROXY xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:yyyy

To check for outdated packages:

pkg_version -vIL=

or

pkg_version -vIL'<'

Murdering File System

When evaluating file systems, choose the one that doesn't murder your wife.

Tools of the trade dept: Network Monitoring

http://www.zabbix.com/ (++)
http://www.jffnms.org/
http://www.zenoss.com/
http://www.hyperic.com/
http://www.cacti.net/

Tools of the trade dept: wireshark and ratproxy

http://www.wireshark.org/ - network protocol analyzer
http://code.google.com/p/ratproxy/ - semi automated passive security audit tool (that's a mouthful)

Disable some PHP functions

Disable some uneeded functions. Add these to your php.ini

disable_functions: escapeshellarg, escapeshellcmd, exec, passthru, proc_close, proc_get_status, proc_nice, proc_open, proc_terminate, shell_exec, system, pcntl_exec, pcntl_fork, popen, phpinfo

Edit: Those who managed to gain access to a web server will look for these process when you have PHP installed. If you won't use it, disable it.

Sendmail premature EOM: unexpected close

Been geeting some errors on our sendmail server with:

premature EOM: unexpected close

at the sending server, the error was:

Deferred: Operation timed out with

and mails can't get in even if their really small. It turns out one of the RBLs I've configured is not responding anymore. I've commented out till I find out which one.

Look for:

FEATURE(`dnsbl',blah blah...

and comment them out:

dnl FEATURE(`dnsbl',blah blah...

run make or rebuild sendmail.mc then restart/reload sendmail.

Download a site and save a mirror copy:

wget -nv -E -k -m -p http://www.whatever.com

Be sure to check robots.txt as it may not allow some folders to be accessed.

Update[2008-06-19]: If there are javascript generated images, CSS background images, they won't be saved.

Handy Joomla functions:

$user = new mosUser( $database );
$user->load( (int)$row->id );

mosMail($mosConfig_mailfrom, $mosConfig_fromname, $confirmEmail, $subject, $message);

Recursive tasks unix style

I had to update a php file and each php file is under a different folder. A folder represents a site I'm updating:

site1.com

site2.net

site3.com.tw

so, I had to:

for j in *; do echo $j; cd $j/html && (for i in `find . -name "configuration.php"` ; do chflags noschg $i; perl -pi.bak -e 's/apache/apache2/g' $i; chflags schg $i; done; ) && cd ../.. ; done

I needed two loops as find would crap out because of the extra deep directory structure. Or maybe there's a flag to tell find not to go eny deeper than 1?

You might be wondering what's the chflags is for. It's an extra measure it won't get overwritten by Apache even if the the owner is root:wheel.

Securing RedHat Linux

From the "it-might-be-useful" department:

http://www.puschitz.com/SecuringLinux.shtml

Remove ^M in files

After transfering files from the Windows/DOS world, you somtimes get ^M at the end of each line. To remove:

tr -d \\r < dosfile > newfile