It is widely known that, if virtual hosts in Apache (httpd) are configured to permit vhost administrators override specific configuration options at the directory level using htaccess files, the web server consumes valuable time in order to check whether an htaccess file exists in every directory included in the requested path and parse it. On…
setenforce is a command line utility that is used to switch the mode SELinux is running in from enforcing to permissive and vice versa without requiring a reboot. Lately, I’ve started experimenting again with SELinux on a live system. The default targeted SELinux policy, as usual, needs some adjustment to work with a custom server…
I use Microsoft Windows 7 RC on my main desktop computer since June 2009. Since there were no Windows ports of my favorite editors in Linux (gedit on Fedora/CentOS), I decided to use Notepad++, an open-source source code editor and Notepad replacement, which is released as free-software. Soon I noticed signs that the application might…
It’s been a long time since the last time I had done any cleaning in the G-Loaded Forums. I use the forums for further discussion about the published content, since the comments are disabled after a period of time. During the last months the place had been left at the hands of bots. But this…
delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have…
You may have obtained my password, but you can’t type it like me! This could be the summary of the excellent article, titled Identify and verify users based on how they type by Nathan Harrington, which demonstrates how it is possible to enhance a computer system’s security by using a special algorithm which, in addition…
The National Security Agency (NSA) of the USA has published some security configuration guides for various popular Operating Systems. Linux is covered by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 security guide, but most of the included information can be easily translated to other Linux distributions. As it is clearly stated in the guide’s disclaimer, all…
This article describes how to implement SSL-enabled name-based vhosts – that is secure virtual hosts which share the same IP address and port – with the SNI-capable mod_gnutls module for Apache’s httpd web server.
The Slack World, a Slackware related online magazine has published a very good write-up about how to create a chroot environment. Tom Newsom writes in his article: In this document I shall be showing you how you can run, for testing purposes perhaps, two versions of Slackware simultaneously. Both will be fully fledged installs and…
The Red Hat Magazine included an excellent tip about how to lock out a user, if it fails to supply a valid password for a pre-defined number of login attempts. This is implemented by making use of the The PAM module pam_tally. This practice serves as a barrier for those, either human or bots, who…