VacantServer WordPress sites are getting hammered with bad logins and probes. We’ve implemented a plugin to log failed login attempts to syslog, and a Fail2Ban filter for the same. If you run these on RedHat, you’ll need some additional configuration info… here it is: WordPress login failure regex (error_log): ^%(__prefix_line)sAuthentication failure for .* from <HOST>$ […]
Author Archive | Chris Gilligan
Fail2Ban Regex for RedHat, Fedora, CentOS and Amazon Linux 2013
Fail2Ban is a very efficient daemon that scans log files for malicious activity, and offers several options to ban offending IPs and hostnames. Although it is highly configurable, it requires a depth of knowledge beyond that required for GUI-accessible firewalls such as ConfigServer Security & Firewall. Harden the Kernel Before do anything further, it is […]
Auto Mailer Form with Validation and reCAPTCHA
I was recently searching for a form template that uses Twitter’s Bootstrap framework. PFBC, the PHP Form Builder Class, was recently refactored with Bootstrap, and it also supports validation and reCAPTCHA. PFBC does not include a form handler, but it does take the difficult and redundant work out of creating self-validating forms. Adding an auto-mailer […]
Install phpMyAdmin with SSL on CentOS, Amazon Linux, RedHat (Apache or NginX)
How to install phpMyAdmin on CentOS, Amazon Linux, or Redhat. Configuration instructions are provided for Apache and NginX web servers.
Portable Wifi Hotspot Rental Site
Trawire.com offers portable 4G MiFi and iPad rentals for visitors traveling to Iceland. Trawire’s CIO approached me for assistance after his systems administrator bailed and left him with a poorly maintained, self-hosted MacMini server running unoptimized WordPress installs. I migrated the site to Amazon Web Services, where it now can handle traffic spikes and can be […]
SSL and CloudFront CDN Support for WebFonts via .htaccess
I recently upgraded my WordPress theme to WooThemes Canvas 5.x, and I found that some of the icons were not rendering, but were showing a letter or integer instead. I dug into the code and found that these icons are now delivered via @font-face webfonts. Meanwhile, I’m working on a client’s e-commerce site with Google […]
Varnish VCL and Config for WordPress with W3 Total Cache
I have been working on a Varnish front-end for Apache, to be used with WordPress sites. I described the architecture in Load Balancing Virtualmin WordPress Hosting Server with Varnish on AWS. I now have a configuration that seems to work for all WordPress features, including logged-out commenting. This configuration also works well with W3 Total […]
Punk Rock Music Community
Punktastic.com is a community powered site that covers punk music in Britain, but is poised to go worldwide. They cover punk and hardcore shows and festivals, and provide album reviews, video interviews and more. With a growing audience and user base, Punktastic needed a more reliable and robust web server, so they made the move […]
WordPress with W3 Total Cache on Nginx with APC (Virtualmin)
Virtualmin now includes support for Nginx web server. I deploy many WordPress sites with W3 Total Cache and APC Alternative PHP Cache, so I was very interested to see how Nginx performance compares to Apache for WordPress, and whether APC and W3TC would play nice with Nginx. I prefer to install WordPress in public_html/wordpress for […]
Farm to Table Restaurant Website
Joe Naturals Farm Store Cafe is a “farm to table” cafe and natural foods store located in historic Leiper’s Fork, near Franklin, TN. The owners contacted me through a fellow farmer with whom I have worked on several web projects. The website project was languishing, after being abandoned by a designer who lacked knowledge of […]