Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Unix server security



  An experience on fixing HTTP 406 Not Acceptable error

This post is about an experience of mine on fixing a HTTP 406 Not Acceptable error seen on one of my page. Just got back from a business trip and opened my computer as usual to start to monitor my website statistics. But when I opened the page on showing real time page views, it shows nothing but zero. So I pressed F12 to bring up the developer tool to check on what's going on. The logic of loading the real time page view is backed by AJAX call. In the developer tool console, I see that the rAJA...

   PHP,AJAX,HTML,HTTP 406,CONTENT-TYPE     2019-03-30 04:09:10

  Backend-as-a-service?

As the list of *-as-a-service’s continues to grow, I thought I’d throw one into the mix. What about the idea of a backend-as-a-service (BaaS)? The recent surge of client side Javascript frameworks along with the attractiveness of simple RESTful APIs has created an environment where server-side interaction can be reduced to simply database interaction (including validation and some computation). But why stop there? What if the server-side of the equation was simply a RESTful, ...

   Web design,Backend,Service,BaaS,Client JavaScript     2011-12-29 09:07:38

  SSH Security and You - /bin/false is *not* security

Backstory While at RIT around 2004 or 2005, I discovered that a few important machines at the datacenter allowed all students, faculty, and staff to authenticate against them via ssh. Everyone's shells appear to be set to /bin/false (or some derivative) on said machines, so the only thing you'll see after you authenticate is the login banner and your connection will close. I thought to myself, "Fine, no shell for me. I wonder if port forwarding works?" ...

   Linux,Security,/bin/false,SSH     2012-02-06 07:46:29

  Top 10 PHP Best Security Practices for Sys Admins

PHP is widely used for various of web development. However, misconfigured server-side scripting would create all sorts of problem. And here are php security best practices that you should aware when configuring PHP securely. Nowadays most of the web servers are operated under Linux environment (like: Ubuntu, Debian...etc). Hence, in the following article, I am going to use list top 10 ways to enhance PHP Security Best Practices under Linux environment. My sample setup for PHP Security Tips: D...

   PHP,code security,System admin,Advice,Best practice     2012-02-01 00:04:37

  Steps to connect to MySQL on Windows Command Line

To connect to MySQL database on Windows through Command line, there are some steps to be followed.1. You need to start the MySQL service, you can go to Start->Control Panel->System and Securities->Administrative Tools->Component Service->Services(local), then on the right panel, you can find one service name called MySQL and you should start this service2. Go the the MySQL installation folder, which is something like this : C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1. In this folder, ...

   MySQL,Window,Command line,Connection,mysqld     2011-11-05 08:22:39

  OpenLDAP Proxy -- Tricks and tips

Just like other software configuration, there would be issues encountered during the OpenLDAP proxy setup process. In this post, we would try to summarize some of the tricks and tips for OpenLDAP proxy setup. OpenLDAP Version We would always recommend that you install the latest version of the OpenLDAP because they contain the latest features, bug fixes and security patches. You should always refer to the latest release notes for new changes. In case you have used an earlier version of Open...

   SSL,AUTHENTICATION,OPENLDAP,OPENLDAP PROXY,ATTRIBUTE MAPPING,OVERLAY     2017-11-04 04:29:38

  When to use STDERR instead of STDOUT

Every process is initialized with three open file descriptors, stdin, stdout, and stderr. stdin is an abstraction for accepting input (from the keyboard or from pipes) and stdout is an abstraction for giving output (to a file, to a pipe, to a console). That's a very simplified explanation but true nonetheless. Those three file descriptors are collectively called 'The Standard Streams'. Where does stderr come from? It's fairly straightforward to understand why stdin and stdout exist, however ...

   UNIX,STDERR,STDOUT,Difference     2012-01-14 12:07:43

  Something you may not know about Shell

Shell is also called command line interface, it is the interface between *nix users and computer. Shell is a program which provides service to access OS kernel services. This article is to introduce some not so well known but useful and interesting knowledge about shell. Wiki shell was born almost at the same time as Unix. The first UNIX shell was written by Ken Thompson in 1971 and its name is Thompson sh. It's older than Linux kernel. The default Shell in most *nix and MacOS is bash, bash was...

   Linux, Unix,Shell,Command     2012-11-24 07:19:47

  Using public key authentication in SSH

SSH is a popular cryptographic network protocol for secure network service operation. It is frequently used in remote server login. For a system administrator or software developer, SSH is frequently used to access remote servers or development servers or testing servers etc.  To login with SSH, there are different authentication mechanisms : password, public key and interactive etc. If a remote server needs to be accessed frequently, password authentication may be too troublesome as p...

   LINUX,DEBUG,SSH,PUBLIC KEY     2016-09-10 05:55:46

  20 Database Design Best Practices

Use well defined and consistent names for tables and columns (e.g. School, StudentCourse, CourseID ...).Use singular for table names (i.e. use StudentCourse instead of StudentCourses). Table represents a collection of entities, there is no need for plural names.Don’t use spaces for table names. Otherwise you will have to use ‘{‘, ‘[‘, ‘“’ etc. characters to define tables (i.e. for accesing table Student Course you'll write “Student Cour...

   Database design,20 tips,Well defined name,Design pattern     2012-02-07 12:10:48