BlueOnyx 5209R – Issues with importing signed certificates

Importing signed certificates on BlueOnyx has always been somewhat of a challenge and it’s not well documented. The gist of it is that the certificate you want to import needs to consist of both the certificate and the corresponding private key, and it must have an extension that BlueOnyx understands (*.crt or *.cert works). Even so, my attempt to import a signed certificate from RapidSSL failed with a message stating that the imported certificate did not contain the correct private key.
Categories: GNU/Linux

Unexpected VPN bypass attempts on Arch Linux

So I was minding my own business while connected to my VPN service when I noticed several blocked outbound network connections appearing in my firewall log. For some reason my wifi adapter (wlp3s0) was trying to connect directly to the internet without having traffic routed through my VPN interface (tun0). Was this my reward for not reviewing AUR PKGBUILD files, or was there another explanation as to why wlp3s0 wanted to disclose my real IP address?

Categories: GNU/Linux

Slackware 15.0 will ship Plasma 5

There has been a long and tedious debate among slackers over whether the distribution should stick with KDE4 or move to Plasma 5. According to Slackware’s KDE maintainer Eric Hameleers, a decision has been made and Slackware 15.0 will ship Plasma 5.

Categories: GNU/Linux, Slackware Linux

Another significant WordPress brute-force attack in the works

So today I’ve experienced a more significant than usual attack against WordPress installations hosted on one of our company servers. So far I’ve blocked more than 17000 21000 unique IP addresses, but the attackers seem to have an endless supply and they’re not slowing down. Note: This article was updated on January 27, 2018.

Categories: GNU/Linux

How to enable HTTP/2 in Apache 2.4 on Gentoo Linux

I recently added support for the HTTP/2 protocol on this server and I am really pleased with the additional performance gains. This VPS was already running a functional LAMP stack, so the following steps describe the necessary configuration changes for my setup which relies on Apache with PHP-FPM.

Categories: GNU/Linux

Gentoo 17.0 profile upgrade is complete

This Scaleway hosted Gentoo x86_64 server (VC1S with 2 cores and 2GB of RAM) has finally completed the move to the new Gentoo 17.0 profile. Rebuilding my entire system consisting of 277 packages lasted 26 hours and went by without any issues. All packages were re-emerged with --jobs=1 to keep the system responsive during compilation, and to avoid exhausting available memory. Gentoo throwing a warning about the use of a deprecated profile.
Categories: GNU/Linux

Season's greetings from the Chaos Computer Club

So the 34. Chaos Communication Congress is currently in progress and the boys (and girls) attending were kind enough to send some thoughtful wishes to working sysadmins around the globe. The following entry appeared in my server log earlier today:

Categories: According to Jim

Gentoo - Protect your running PHP version from emerge depclean

Now that I’ve been running this blog on Gentoo Linux for a while, I’ve discovered a few new potential gotchas when failing to pay attention while interacting with Portage. The latest addition to my list was nearly removing my running PHP installation with emerge --depclean.

Categories: GNU/Linux

Wordfence warns against a massive brute-force attack campaign

On the 18th of December Wordfence posted the following entry describing an ongoing distributed brute force-attack campaign targeting WordPress installations. It was accompanied by a dramatic chart highlighting the number of attacks per hour. According to Wordfence, it was the most aggressive campaign they’ve seen so far. However, as a WordPress hosting provider I’ve found no data to support these claims. I’ve not experienced any increase in dictionary attacks or other malicious traffic against WordPress installations on our web hosting platform.
Categories: According to Jim