Posts Tagged ‘due’

Newer Entries »

Howto create Linux Music Audio CD from MP3 files / Create playable WAV format Audio CD Albums from MP3s

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

cdburning-audio-music-cd-from-mp3-on-linuxcomapct-disc-tux-linux-logo

Recently my Mother asked me to prepare a Music Audio CD for her from a popular musician accordionist Stefan Georgiev from Dobrudja who has a unique folklore Bulgarian music.

As some of older people who still remember the age of the CD and who had most likely been into the CD burning Copy / Piracy business so popular in the countries of the ex-USSR so popular in the years 1995-2000 audio ,  Old CD Player Devices were not able to play the MP3 file format due to missing codecs (as MP3 was a proprietary compression that can't be installed on every device without paying the patent to the MP3 compression rights holder.

The revolutionary MP3 compression used to be booming standard for transferring Music data due to its high compression which made an ordinary MP3 of 5 minutes of 5MB (10+ times more compression than an ordinary classic WAV Audio the CPU intensiveness of MP3 files that puts on the reading device, requiring the CD Player to have a more powerful CPU.

Hence  due to high licensing cost and requirement for more powerful CPU enabled Audio Player many procuders of Audio Players never introduced MP3 to their devices and MP3 Neve become a standard for the Audio CD that was the standard for music listening inside almost every car out there.

Nowdays it is very rare need to create a Audio CD as audio CDs seems to be almost dead (As I heard from a Richard Stallman lecture In USA nowadays there is only 1 shop in the country where you can still buy CD or DVD drives) and only in third world as Africa Audio CDs perhaps are still in circulation.

Nomatter that as we have an old Stereo CD player on my village and perhaps many others, still have some old retired CD reading devices being able to burn out a CD is a useful thing.

Thus to make mother happy and as a learning excercise, I decided to prepare the CD for her on my Linux notebook.
Here I'll shortly describe the takes I took to make it happen which hopefully will be useful for other people that need to Convert and burn Audio CD from MP3 Album.

 

1. First I downloaded the Album in Mp3 format from Torrent tracker

My homeland Bulgaria and specific birth place place the city of Dobrich has been famous its folklore:  Galina Durmushlijska and Stefan Georgiev are just 2 of the many names along with Оркестър Кристал (Orchestra Crystal) and the multitude of gifted singers. My mother has a santiment for Stefan Georgiev, as she listened to this gifted accordinist on her Uncle's marriage.

Thus In my case this was (Стефан Георгиев Хора и ръченици от Добруджа) the album full song list here If you're interested to listen the Album and Enjoy unique Folklore from Dobrudja (Dobrich) my home city, Stefan Georgiev's album Hora and Rachenica Dances is available here

 


Stefan_Georgiev-old-audio-Music-CD-Hora-i-Rychenici-ot-Dobrudja-Horos-and-Ruchenitsas-from-Dobrudja-CD_Cover
I've downloaded them from Bulgarian famous torrent tracker zamunda.net in MP3 format.
Of course you need to have a CD / DVD readed and write device on the PC which nowdays is not present on most modern notebooks and PCs but as a last resort you can buy some cheap External Optical CD / DVD drive for 25 to 30$ from Amazon / Ebay etc.

 

2. You will need to install a couple of programs on Linux host (if you don't have it already)


To be able to convert from command line from MP3 to WAV you will need as minimum ffmpeg and normalize-audio packages as well as some kind of command line burning tool like cdrskin  wodim which is
the fork of old good known cdrecord, so in case if you you're wondering what happened with it just
use instead wodim.

Below is a good list of tools (assuming you have enough HDD space) to install:

 

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-get install –yes dvd+rw-tools cdw cdrdao audiotools growisofs cdlabelgen dvd+rw-tools k3b brasero wodim ffmpeg lame normalize-audio libavcodec58

 

Note that some of above packages I've installed just for other Write / Read operations for DVD drives and you might not need that but it is good to have it as some day in future you will perhaps need to write out a DVD or something.
Also the k3b here is specific to KDE and if you're a GNOME user you could use Native GNOME Desktop app such brasero or if you're in a more minimalistic Linux desktop due to hardware contrains use XFCE's native xfburn program.

If you're a console / terminal geek like me you will definitely enjoy to use cdw
 

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-cache show cdw|grep -i description -A 1
Description-en: Tool for burning CD's – console version
 Ncurses-based frontend for wodim and genisoimage. It can handle audio and
—
Description-md5: 77dacb1e6c00dada63762b78b9a605d5
Homepage: http://cdw.sourceforge.net/

 

3. Selecting preferred CD / DVD / BD program to use to write out the CD from Linux console


cdw uses wodim (which is a successor of good old known console cdrecord command most of use used on Linux in the past to burn out new Redhat / Debian / different Linux OS distro versions for upgrade purposes on Desktop and Server machines.

To check whether your CD / DVD drive is detected and ready to burn on your old PC issue:

 

root@jeremiah:/# wodim -checkdrive
Device was not specified. Trying to find an appropriate drive…
Detected CD-R drive: /dev/cdrw
Using /dev/cdrom of unknown capabilities
Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 5
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : 'HL-DT-ST'
Identification : 'DVDRAM GT50N    '
Revision       : 'LT20'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.
Using generic SCSI-3/mmc   CD-R/CD-RW driver (mmc_cdr).
Driver flags   : MMC-3 SWABAUDIO BURNFREE
Supported modes: TAO PACKET SAO SAO/R96P SAO/R96R RAW/R16 RAW/R96P RAW/R96R

You can also use xorriso (whose added value compared to other console burn cd tools is is not using external program for ISO9660 formatting neither it use an external or an external burn program for CD, DVD or BD (Blue Ray) drive but it has its own libraries incorporated from libburnia-project.org libs.

Below output is from my Thinkpad T420 notebook. If the old computer CD drive is there and still functional in most cases you should not get issues to detect it.

cdw ncurses text based CD burner tool's interface is super intuitive as you can see from below screenshot:

cdw-burn-cds-from-console-terminal-on-GNU-Linux-and-FreeBSD-old-PC-computer

CDW has many advanced abilities such as “blanking” a disk or ripping an audio CD on a selected folder. To overcome the possible problem of CDW not automatically detecting the disk you have inserted you can go to the “Configuration” menu, press F5 to enter the Hardware options and then on the first entry press enter and choose your device (by pressing enter again). Save the setting with F9.
 

4. Convert MP3 / MP4 Files or whatever format to .WAV to be ready to burn to CD


Collect all the files you want to have collected from the CD album in .MP3 a certain directory and use a small one liner loop to convert files to WAV with ffmpeg:
 

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

for i in $( ls *.mp3); do ffmpeg -i $i $i.wav; done


If you don't have ffmpeg installed and have mpg123 you can also do the Mp3 to WAV conversion with mpg123 cmd like so:

 

for i in $( ls ); do mpg123 -w $i.wav $i.mp3; done


Another alternative for conversion is to use good old lame (used to create Mp3 audio files but abling to also) decode
mp3 to wav.

 

lame –decode somefile.mp3 somefile.wav


In the past there was a burn command tool that was able to easily convert MP3s to WAV but in up2date Linux modern releases it is no longer available most likely due to licensing issues, for those on older Debian Linux 7 / 8 / 9 / Ubuntu 8 to 12.XX / old Fedoras etc. if you have the command you can install burn and use it (and not bother with shell loops):

apt-get install burn

or

yum install burn
…


Once you have it to convert

 

$ burn -A -a *.mp3
 

 

5. Fix file naming to remove empty spaces such as " " and substitute to underscores as some Old CD Players are
unable to understand spaces in file naming with another short loop.

 

for f in *; do mv "$f" `echo $f | tr ' ' '_'`; done

 

6. Normalize audio produced .WAV files (set the music volume to a certain level)


In case if wondering why normalize audio is needed here is short extract from normalize-audio man page command description to shed some light.

"normalize-audio  is  used  to  adjust  the volume of WAV or MP3 audio files to a standard volume level.  This is useful for things like creating mp3 mixes, where different recording levels on different albums can cause the volume to  vary  greatly from song to song."
 

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

normalize-audio -m *.wav

 

7. Burn the produced normalized Audio WAV files to the the CD

 

wodim -v -fix -eject dev='/dev/sr0' -audio -pad *.wav


Alternatively you can conver all your MP3 files to .WAV with anything be it audacity
or another program or even use 
GNOME's CDBurn tool brasero (if gnome user) or KDE's CDBurn which in my opinion is
the best CD / DVD burning application for Linux K3B.

Burning Audio CD with K3b is up to few clicks and super easy and even k3b is going to handle the MP3 to WAV file Conversion itself. To burn audio with K3B just run it and click over 'New Audio CD Project'.

k3b-on-debian-gnu-linux-burn-audio-cd-screenshot

For those who want to learn a bit more on CD / DVD / Blue-Ray burning on GNU / Linux good readings are:
Linux CD Burning Mini Howto, is Linux's CD Writing Howto on ibiblio (though a bit obsolete) or Debian's official documentation on BurnCD.
 

8. What we learned here


Though the accent of this tutorial was how to Create Audio Music CD from MP3 on GNU / Linux, the same commands are available in most FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD ports tree so you can use the same method to build prepare Audio Music CD on *BSDs.

In this article, we went through few basic ways on how to prepare WAV files from MP3 normalize the new created WAV files on Linux, to prepare files for creation of Audio Music CD for the old mom or grandma's player or even just for fun to rewind some memories. For GUI users this is easily done with  k3b,  brasero or xfburn.

I've pointed you to cdw a super useful text ncurses tool that makes CD Burninng from plain text console (on servers) without a Xorg / WayLand  GUI installed super easy. It was shortly reviewed what has changed over the last few years and why and why cdrecord was substituted for wodim. A few examples were given on how to handle conversion through bash shell loops and you were pointed to some extra reading resources to learn a bit more on the topic.
There are plenty of custom scripts around for doing the same CD Burn / Covnersion tasks, so pointing me to any external / Shell / Perl scripts is mostly welcome.

Hope this learned you something new, Enjoy ! 🙂

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in File Convert Tools, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Various | No Comments »

Find all running hosts, used IPs and ports on your local wireless / ethernet network or how to do a basic network security audit with nmap

Monday, September 4th, 2017

Find all running hosts / used IPs on your local wireless or ethernet network

nmap-scn-local-network-find-all-running-hosts-used-IPs-on-your-wireless-ethernet-network

If you're using a Free Software OS such as GNU / Linux or some other proprietary OS such as Mac OS X or Windows and you need a quick way to check all running IPs hosts / nodes locally on your current connected Ethernet or Wireless network, here is how to do it with nmap (Network exploration and security tool port scanner).

So why would you do scan that? 

Well just for fun, out of curiousity or just because you want to inspect your local network whether someone unexpected cracker did not break and is not using your Wi-Fi or Ethernet local network and badly snoring your network listening for passwords.

Before you start you should have installed NMAP network scanner on your GNU / Linux, to do so on 

Redhat Based Linux (Fedora / CentOS / Redhat Enterprise RHEL):

 

yum -y install nmap
…

 

On Deb based GNU / Linux-es such as Ubuntu / Mint / Debian etc.

 

apt-get install –yes nmap
…

 

To install nmap on FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD OS issue from console or terminal:

 

cd /usr/ports/security/nmap
make install clean 
…

 

or if you prefer to install it from latest binary instead of compiling

 

pkg_add -vr nmap
…

 

On a proprietary Mac OS X (I don't recommend you to use this obnoxious OS which is designed as a proprpietary software to steal your freedom and control you, but anyways for Mac OS victims), you can do it to with Macs equivalent tool of apt-get / yum called homebrew:

Open Mac OS X terminal and to install homebrew run:

 

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew install nmap
brew search nmap
brew info nmap

 

If you want to do it system wide become root (super user) from Mac terminal with

 

su root

 

and run above commands as administrator user.

Windows users might take a look at Nmap for Windows or use the M$ Windows native portqry command line port scanner

Test whether nmap is properly installed and ready to use with command:

 

nmap –help
Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org )
Usage: nmap [Scan Type(s)] [Options] {target specification}
TARGET SPECIFICATION:
  Can pass hostnames, IP addresses, networks, etc.
  Ex: scanme.nmap.org, microsoft.com/24, 192.168.0.1; 10.0.0-255.1-254
  -iL <inputfilename>: Input from list of hosts/networks
  -iR <num hosts>: Choose random targets
  –exclude <host1[,host2][,host3],…>: Exclude hosts/networks
  –excludefile <exclude_file>: Exclude list from file
HOST DISCOVERY:
  -sL: List Scan – simply list targets to scan
  -sn: Ping Scan – disable port scan
  -Pn: Treat all hosts as online — skip host discovery
  -PS/PA/PU/PY[portlist]: TCP SYN/ACK, UDP or SCTP discovery to given ports
  -PE/PP/PM: ICMP echo, timestamp, and netmask request discovery probes
  -PO[protocol list]: IP Protocol Ping
  -n/-R: Never do DNS resolution/Always resolve [default: sometimes]
  –dns-servers <serv1[,serv2],…>: Specify custom DNS servers
  –system-dns: Use OS's DNS resolver
  –traceroute: Trace hop path to each host
SCAN TECHNIQUES:
  -sS/sT/sA/sW/sM: TCP SYN/Connect()/ACK/Window/Maimon scans
  -sU: UDP Scan
  -sN/sF/sX: TCP Null, FIN, and Xmas scans
  –scanflags <flags>: Customize TCP scan flags
  -sI <zombie host[:probeport]>: Idle scan
  -sY/sZ: SCTP INIT/COOKIE-ECHO scans
  -sO: IP protocol scan
  -b <FTP relay host>: FTP bounce scan
PORT SPECIFICATION AND SCAN ORDER:
  -p <port ranges>: Only scan specified ports
    Ex: -p22; -p1-65535; -p U:53,111,137,T:21-25,80,139,8080,S:9
  -F: Fast mode – Scan fewer ports than the default scan
  -r: Scan ports consecutively – don't randomize
  –top-ports <number>: Scan <number> most common ports
  –port-ratio <ratio>: Scan ports more common than <ratio>
SERVICE/VERSION DETECTION:
  -sV: Probe open ports to determine service/version info
  –version-intensity <level>: Set from 0 (light) to 9 (try all probes)
  –version-light: Limit to most likely probes (intensity 2)
  –version-all: Try every single probe (intensity 9)
  –version-trace: Show detailed version scan activity (for debugging)
SCRIPT SCAN:
  -sC: equivalent to –script=default
  –script=<Lua scripts>: <Lua scripts> is a comma separated list of 
           directories, script-files or script-categories
  –script-args=<n1=v1,[n2=v2,…]>: provide arguments to scripts
  –script-args-file=filename: provide NSE script args in a file
  –script-trace: Show all data sent and received
  –script-updatedb: Update the script database.
  –script-help=<Lua scripts>: Show help about scripts.
           <Lua scripts> is a comma separted list of script-files or
           script-categories.
OS DETECTION:
  -O: Enable OS detection
  –osscan-limit: Limit OS detection to promising targets
  –osscan-guess: Guess OS more aggressively
TIMING AND PERFORMANCE:
  Options which take <time> are in seconds, or append 'ms' (milliseconds),
  's' (seconds), 'm' (minutes), or 'h' (hours) to the value (e.g. 30m).
  -T<0-5>: Set timing template (higher is faster)
  –min-hostgroup/max-hostgroup <size>: Parallel host scan group sizes
  –min-parallelism/max-parallelism <numprobes>: Probe parallelization
  –min-rtt-timeout/max-rtt-timeout/initial-rtt-timeout <time>: Specifies
      probe round trip time.
  –max-retries <tries>: Caps number of port scan probe retransmissions.
  –host-timeout <time>: Give up on target after this long
  –scan-delay/–max-scan-delay <time>: Adjust delay between probes
  –min-rate <number>: Send packets no slower than <number> per second
  –max-rate <number>: Send packets no faster than <number> per second
FIREWALL/IDS EVASION AND SPOOFING:
  -f; –mtu <val>: fragment packets (optionally w/given MTU)
  -D <decoy1,decoy2[,ME],…>: Cloak a scan with decoys
  -S <IP_Address>: Spoof source address
  -e <iface>: Use specified interface
  -g/–source-port <portnum>: Use given port number
  –data-length <num>: Append random data to sent packets
  –ip-options <options>: Send packets with specified ip options
  –ttl <val>: Set IP time-to-live field
  –spoof-mac <mac address/prefix/vendor name>: Spoof your MAC address
  –badsum: Send packets with a bogus TCP/UDP/SCTP checksum
OUTPUT:
  -oN/-oX/-oS/-oG <file>: Output scan in normal, XML, s|<rIpt kIddi3,
     and Grepable format, respectively, to the given filename.
  -oA <basename>: Output in the three major formats at once
  -v: Increase verbosity level (use -vv or more for greater effect)
  -d: Increase debugging level (use -dd or more for greater effect)
  –reason: Display the reason a port is in a particular state
  –open: Only show open (or possibly open) ports
  –packet-trace: Show all packets sent and received
  –iflist: Print host interfaces and routes (for debugging)
  –log-errors: Log errors/warnings to the normal-format output file
  –append-output: Append to rather than clobber specified output files
  –resume <filename>: Resume an aborted scan
  –stylesheet <path/URL>: XSL stylesheet to transform XML output to HTML
  –webxml: Reference stylesheet from Nmap.Org for more portable XML
  –no-stylesheet: Prevent associating of XSL stylesheet w/XML output
MISC:
  -6: Enable IPv6 scanning
  -A: Enable OS detection, version detection, script scanning, and traceroute
  –datadir <dirname>: Specify custom Nmap data file location
  –send-eth/–send-ip: Send using raw ethernet frames or IP packets
  –privileged: Assume that the user is fully privileged
  –unprivileged: Assume the user lacks raw socket privileges
  -V: Print version number
  -h: Print this help summary page.
EXAMPLES:
  nmap -v -A scanme.nmap.org
  nmap -v -sn 192.168.0.0/16 10.0.0.0/8
  nmap -v -iR 10000 -Pn -p 80
SEE THE MAN PAGE (http://nmap.org/book/man.html) FOR MORE OPTIONS AND EXAMPLES

 


Most local router local networks are running under an IP range of 192.168.0.1/24 (192.168.0.1.254) or 192.168.1.1/24 or at some weird occasions depending on how the router is configured it might be something like 192.168.10.0/24 to be sure on what kind of network your computer is configured, you can check with ifconfig command, what kind of network IP has the router assigned to your computer, here is output from my Debian GNU / Linux /sbin/ifconfig

 

 hipo@noah:~$ /sbin/ifconfig 
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:336 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:336 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:26656 (26.0 KiB)  TX bytes:26656 (26.0 KiB)

 

 

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:bf:bd:27:59  
          inet addr:192.168.0.103  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21c:bfff:ffbd:2759/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:112836 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:55363 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:141318655 (134.7 MiB)  TX bytes:7391330 (7.0 MiB)

 

As evident from above output my router assigns IPs via DHCP once authenticated into the Wi-Fi router under standard IP range of 192.168.0.0/24

So under this IP range case, to inspect my small local networkconnected computer I had to run from gnome-terminal or under a /dev/ttyX virtual console:

 

hipo@noah:~$ nmap -sn 192.168.0.0/24

Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2017-09-04 12:45 EEST
Nmap scan report for pcfreak (192.168.0.1)
Host is up (0.011s latency).
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.103
Host is up (0.00011s latency).
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (2 hosts up) scanned in 2.53 seconds


-sn argument instructs nmap to do the so called ping scan, e.g. not to do a port s
can after host discovery but just print available hosts that are responding

Some bigger corporate networks are configured to run a couple of local networks simultaneously such as 192.168.168.0.0/24, 192.168.1.0/24, 192.168.2.0/24 etc.

So if that's the case you can add more virtual IPs to your ifconfig after becoming root super user with:

 

hipo@noah:~$ su root 
Password: 
root@noah:/home/hipo# 

 

And then run:

 

/sbin/ifconfig wlan0:0 192.168.1.110 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0:1 192.168.2.110 netmask 255.255.255.0

 

etc.

Note that here I purposefully choose .110 IP because often the 192.168.1.1 is an IP assigned to the router and that might cause some IP conflicts and trigger alarms in the router security which I want to avoid.

To check just added extra Virtual IPs on wlan0 wireless interface (note that depending on your Wi-Fi card and your driver this interface might come under a different name on your computer):

 

root@noah# /sbin/ifconfig |grep -i wlan0 -A 1
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:bf:bd:25:59  
          inet addr:192.168.0.103  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
—
wlan0:0   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:bf:bd:25:59  
          inet addr:192.168.1.110  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
—
wlan0:1   Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:bf:bd:27:59  
          inet addr:192.168.2.110  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
 

 

If you're scanning not on your own network but on a public connected network you might prefer to not use the ping scan as this might identify you in router's firewall as possible intruder and could cause you headaches, besides that some network connected nodes are connected to not respond on a ping scan (some networks purposefully disable pings at all) to avoid possibility of the so called ping flood that might overload a router buffer or bring down hosts on the network beinf flooded.

If you have doubts that a network has ping disabled and it shows no result you can give a try to the so called SYN / FIN Stealth packet scan with added requirement to scan for UDP open ports (-sS) argument

 

root@noah:/~# nmap -sS -sU -sT 192.168.0.1-255

Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2017-09-04 13:31 EEST
Nmap scan report for pcfreak (192.168.0.1)
Host is up (0.012s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
80/tcp   open  http
1900/tcp open  upnp
MAC Address: 10:FE:ED:43:CF:0E (Unknown)

Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.100
Host is up (0.0036s latency).
Not shown: 998 closed ports
PORT      STATE SERVICE
625/tcp   open  apple-xsrvr-admin
49153/tcp open  unknown
MAC Address: 84:38:35:5F:28:75 (Unknown)

Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.103
Host is up (0.000012s latency).
Not shown: 999 closed ports
PORT   STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open  ssh


You might also like to add some verbosy (that would generate a lot of output so be careful):

In case if above scan fails due to firewalls and you have a ping scan disabled on the network too you might also try out the so called nmap connect TCP connect scan (-sT), that would avoid the SYN scan. The -sT is useful also if you're not possessing root superprivileges on nmap running host.

 

nmap -sS -sU 192.168.0.1-255


Note that connect scan could take ages as nmap tries to connect every port from default port scanned ranged on remote found hosts that are reporting as up and running.

If the shown results lead you find some unknown computer / tablet / mobile / phone device connected to your network, then connect to your router and thoroughfully inspect the traffic flowing through it, if you find intruder cut him off and change immediately your router passwords and monitor your network periodically to make sure the unwanted guest did not go back in future.

There is much more you can do with nmap so if you have some extra time and interest into penetration testing I recommend you check out Nmap Book (The Official Nmap project guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computer Security, Curious Facts, FreeBSD, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | No Comments »

How to mount NFS network filesystem to remote server via /etc/fstab on Linux

Friday, January 29th, 2016

mount-nfs-in-linux-via--etc-fstab-howto-mount-remote-partitions-from-application-server-to-storage-server
If you have a server topology part of a project where 3 (A, B, C) servers need to be used to deliver a service (one with application server such as Jboss / Tomcat / Apache, second just as a Storage Server holding a dozens of LVM-ed SSD hard drives and an Oracle database backend to provide data about the project) and you need to access server A (application server) to server B (the Storage "monster") one common solution is to use NFS (Network FileSystem) Mount. 
NFS mount is considered already a bit of obsoleted technology as it is generally considered unsecre, however if SSHFS mount is not required due to initial design decision or because both servers A and B are staying in a serious firewalled (DMZ) dedicated networ then NTS should be a good choice.
Of course to use NFS mount should always be a carefully selected Environment Architect decision so remote NFS mount, imply  that both servers are connected via a high-speed gigabyte network, e.g. network performance is calculated to be enough for application A <-> to network storage B two sides communication not to cause delays for systems end Users.

To test whether the NFS server B mount is possible on the application server A, type something like:

 

mount -t nfs -o soft,timeo=900,retrans=3,vers=3, proto=tcp remotenfsserver-host:/home/nfs-mount-data /mnt/nfs-mount-point


If the mount is fine to make the mount permanent on application server host A (in case of server reboot), add to /etc/fstab end of file, following:

1.2.3.4:/application/local-application-dir-to-mount /application/remote-application-dir-to-mount nfs   rw,bg,nolock,vers=3,tcp,timeo=600,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,hard,intr 1 2


If the NTFS server has a hostname you can also type hostname instead of above example sample IP 1.2.3.4, this is however not recommended as this might cause in case of DNS or Domain problems.
If you want to mount with hostname (in case if storage server IP is being commonly changed due to auto-selection from a DHCP server):

server-hostA:/application/local-application-dir-to-mount /application/remote-application-dir-to-mount nfs   rw,bg,nolock,vers=3,tcp,timeo=600,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,hard,intr 1 2

In above example you need to have the /application/local-application-dir-to-mount (dir where remote NFS folder will be mounted on server A) as well as the /application/remote-application-dir-to-mount
Also on server Storage B server, you have to have running NFS server with firewall accessibility from server A working.

The timeou=600 (is defined in) order to make the timeout for remote NFS accessibility 1 hour in order to escape mount failures if there is some minutes network failure between server A and server B, the rsize and wsize
should be fine tuned according to the files that are being red from remote NFS server and the network speed between the two in the example are due to environment architecture (e.g. to reflect the type of files that are being transferred by the 2)
and the remote NFS server running version and the Linux kernel versions, these settings are for Linux kernel branch 2.6.18.x which as of time of writting this article is obsolete, so if you want to use the settings check for your kernel version and
NTFS and google and experiment.

Anyways, if you're not sure about wsize and and rise, its perfectly safe to omit these 2 values if you're not familiar to it.

To finally check the NFS mount is fine,  grep it:

 

# mount|grep -i nfs
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
server-hostA:/application/remote-application-dir-to-mount on /application/remote-application-dir-to-mount type nfs (rw,bg,nolock,nfsvers=3,tcp,timeo=600,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,hard,intr,addr=1.2.3.4)


That's all enjoy 🙂

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Curious Facts, Linux, Networking, Remote System Administration, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Apache Webserver: No space left on device: Couldn’t create accept lock /var/lock/apache2/accept.lock – Fix

Wednesday, April 8th, 2015

Apache-http-server-no-space-left-on-device-semaphores-quotes-hard-disk-space-resolve-fix-howto
If out of a sudden your Apache webserver crashes and is refusing to start up by manually trying to restart it through its init script on Debian Linux servers – /etc/init.d/apache2 and RPM based ones: /etc/init.d/httpd

Checking in php_error.log there was no shown errors related to loading PHP modules, however apache's error.log show following errors:

[Wed Apr 08 14:20:14 2015] [error] [client 180.76.5.149] client denied by server configuration: /var/www/sploits/info/trojans_info/tr_data/y3190.html
[Wed Apr 08 14:20:39 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:20:39 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.15974) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:25:39 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:25:39 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.16790) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:27:03 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:27:03 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.16826) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:27:53 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:27:53 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.16852) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:30:48 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:30:48 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.17710) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:31:21 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:31:21 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.17727) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:32:40 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Wed Apr 08 14:32:40 2015] [emerg] (28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock (/var/lock/apache2/accept.lock.17780) (5)
[Wed Apr 08 14:38:32 2015] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?

As you can read the most likely reason behind above errors preventing for apache to start is /var/run/apache2.pid  unable to be properly written due to lack of disk space or due to disk quota set for users including for userID with which Apache is running.

First thing I did is of course to see how much free space is on the server:

df -h
Filesystem                     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg00-rootvol       4.0G  1.7G  2.2G  44% /
udev                           7.8G  204K  7.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs                           24G     0   24G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1                      486M   40M  422M   9% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg00-lv_crashdump 1008M   34M  924M   4% /crashdump
/dev/mapper/vg00-homevol       496M   26M  445M   6% /home
/dev/mapper/vg00-lv_opt         12G  1.4G  9.9G  13% /opt
/dev/mapper/vg00-tmpvol        2.0G   68M  1.9G   4% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg00-varvol        7.9G  609M  6.9G   8% /var
/dev/mapper/vg00-crashvol      1.9G   35M  1.8G   2% /var/crash
/dev/mapper/vg00-auditvol      124M  5.6M  113M   5% /var/log/audit
/dev/mapper/vg00-webdienste     60G   12G   48G  19% /webservice

 

As visible from above df command output , there is enough disk on HDD, so this is definitely not the issue:

Then I Checked whether there is Quota enabled on the Linux server with repquota command shows there are no quotas enabled:

# repquota / var/
repquota: Mountpoint (or device) / not found or has no quota enabled.
repquota: Mountpoint (or device) /var not found or has no quota enabled.
repquota: Not all specified mountpoints are using quota.
 

So obviously the only few left possible reason for Apache failing to start after invoked via init script is  either due to left tainted semaphores or due to some server hardware  RAM problem / or a dying  hard disk with bad blocks.

So what are Semaphores? Generally speaking Semaphores are apparatus for conveying information by means of visual signals between applications (something like sockets).They're used for communicating between the active processes of a certain application. In the case of Apache, they’re used to communicate between the parent and child processes, hence if Apache can’t properly write and coordinate these things down, then it can’t communicate properly with all of the processes it starts and hence the Main HTTPD process can't spawn probably its childs preventing Webserver to enter "started mode" and write its PID file.

To check general information about system semaphore arrays there is the ipcs -s command, however my experience is that ipcs -a is more useful (because it lists generally all kind of semaphores) including Semaphore Shared Memory Signals which are the most likely to cause you the problem.

ipcs -a

—— Shared Memory Segments ——–
key        shmid      owner      perms      bytes      nattch     status

—— Semaphore Arrays ——–
key        semid      owner      perms      nsems
0x00000000 22970368   www-data   600        1

—— Message Queues ——–
key        msqid      owner      perms      used-bytes   messages

As you see in my case there is a Semaphore Arrays which had to be cleaned to make Apache2 be able to start again.
 

To clean all left semaphores (arrays) preventing Apache from start properly, use below for one liner bash loop:
 

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/www-data/ {print $2}'`; do (ipcrm -s $i); done
ipcrm -m 0x63637069


Note that above for loop is specific to Debian on CentOS / Fedora / RHEL and other Linuxes the username with which stucked semaphores might stay will be apache or httpd

Depending on the user with which the Apache Webserver is running, run above loop like so:

For RPM based distros (CentOS / RHEL):

 

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/apache/ {print $2}'`; do (ipcrm -s $i); done
ipcrm -m 0x63637069


For other distros such as Slackware or FreeBSD or any custom compiled Apache webserver:

for i in `ipcs -s | awk '/httpd/ {print $2}'`; do (ipcrm -s $i); done
ipcrm -m 0x63637069


If there is also Shared Memory Segments you can remove them with ipcrm i.e.:

ipcrm -m 0x63637069


An alternative way to get rid of left uncleaned semaphores is with xargs:
 

ipcs -s | grep nobody | awk ‘ { print $2 } ‘ | xargs ipcrm


Even though this fixes the issue I understood my problems were due to exceeding semaphores, to check default number of set semaphores on Linux Kernel level as well as few Semaphore related values run below sysctl:

sysctl -a | egrep kernel.sem\|kernel.msgmni
kernel.msgmni = 15904

kernel.sem = 250        32000   32      128


As you can see the number of maximum semaphores is quite large so in my case the failure because of left semaphores was most likely due to some kind of Cracker / Automated bot scanner attack or someone trying malicious against the webserver or simply because of some kind of Apache bug or enormous high load the server faced.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Various, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »

‘host-name’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

mysql-logo-host-name-blocked-because-of-many-connection-errors
My home run machine MySQL server was suddenly down as I tried to check my blog and other sites today, the error I saw while trying to open, this blog as well as other hosted sites using the MySQL was:

Error establishing a database connection

The topology, where this error occured is simple, I have two hosts:

1. Apache version 2.0.64 compiled support externally PHP scripts interpretation via libphp – the host runs on (FreeBSD)

2. A Debian GNU / Linux squeeze running MySQL server version 5.1.61

The Apache host is assigned a local IP address 192.168.0.1 and the SQL server is running on a host with IP 192.168.0.2

To diagnose the error I've logged in to 192.168.0.2 and weirdly the mysql-server was appearing to run just fine:
 

debian:~# ps ax |grep -i mysql
31781 pts/0 S 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe
31940 pts/0 Sl 12:08 /usr/sbin/mysqld –basedir=/usr –datadir=/var/lib/mysql –user=mysql –pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid –socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock –port=3306
31941 pts/0 S 0:00 logger -t mysqld -p daemon.error
32292 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep -i mysql

Moreover I could connect to the localhost SQL server with mysql -u root -p and it seemed to run fine. The error Error establishing a database connection meant that either something is messed up with the database or 192.168.0.2 Mysql port 3306 is not properly accessible.

My first guess was something is wrong due to some firewall rules, so I tried to connect from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.2 with telnet:
 

freebsd# telnet 192.168.0.2 3306
Trying 192.168.0.2…
Connected to jericho.
Escape character is '^]'.
Host 'webserver' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'
Connection closed by foreign host.

Right after the telnet was initiated as I show in the above output the connection was immediately closed with the error:

Host 'webserver' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'Connection closed by foreign host.

In the error 'webserver' is my Apache machine set hostname. The error clearly states the problems with the 'webserver' apache host unable to connect to the SQL database are due to 'many connection errors' and a fix i suggested with mysqladmin flush-hosts

To temporary solve the error and restore my normal connectivity between the Apache and the SQL servers I logged I had to issue on the SQL host:

mysqladmin -u root -p flush-hostsEnter password:

Thogh this temporar fix restored accessibility to the databases and hence the websites errors were resolved, this doesn't guarantee that in the future I wouldn't end up in the same situation and therefore I looked for a permanent fix to the issues once and for all.

The permanent fix consists in changing the default value set for max_connect_error in /etc/mysql/my.cnf, which by default is not too high. Therefore to raise up the variable value, added in my.cnf in conf section [mysqld]:

debian:~# vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf
...
max_connect_errors=4294967295

and afterwards restarted MYSQL:

debian:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..

To make sure the assigned max_connect_errors=4294967295 is never reached due to Apache to SQL connection errors, I've also added as a cronjob.

debian:~# crontab -u root -e
00 03 * * * mysqladmin flush-hosts

In the cron I have omitted the mysqladmin -u root -p (user/pass) input options because for convenience I have already stored the mysql root password in /root/.my.cnf

Here is how /root/.my.cnf looks like:

debian:~# cat /root/.my.cnf
[client]
user=root
password=a_secret_sql_password

Now hopefully, this would permanently solve SQL's 'failure to accept connections' due to too many connection errors for future.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in MySQL, System Administration, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Trip to Ruen Monastery Saint John of Rila – The birthplace of a saint, a God piece of Heaven beauty on earth

Tuesday, February 25th, 2014

ruenski_monastery-beautiful-mountain-view-near-birthplace-of-a-saint

Last Saturday me and my wife Svetlana together with a Christian friend family (Tsvetomir and Dimitrina with their < 2 years old boy – Boris) went to a small 1 day pilgrimage trip to Ruen Monastery – (Ruenski manastery). The holy cloister is situated very near Skrino village, the birth village of greatest Bulgarian saint – saint John of Rila. The village is located about 90 km from Sofia and is very near to town of Boboshevo. To reach Ruen Monastery when coming from Sofia, the traveller has to move in direction of "Kulata / (The Tower)" and to pass the village of Djerman and Usoika. Then before entering the village of Skrino there is a 5 km steep car road leading to the monastery.

ruenski_manastir_near_sightview

Saint John of Rila lived in Skrino until his twenties and due to Christian tradition he accepted monkhood in the nearby monastery next to Skrino and a bit later started a hermit life dwelling himself in his first hermit cave situated near Skrino. The Cave of hermit dwelling of Saint John of Rila is now situated about 200 meters from Ruen Monastery and represents a tiny cave encraved in a rock. The rock is so small that maximum of 2 people can be in cave together. It is amazing how a man could live in such a small space.

hermit_cave_of_saint_John_of_Rila_near-his-birthplace
 

Current Ruen monastery Church is recently rebuild in 1995 and the rest of monastic buildings are completed in y. 2002, but according to history it is known a monastery was existent on same place known in medieval times under name "The Holy Father" in  XV century.

Veneration to Saint John of Rila was so high in mid centuries that obviously people recognized Saint John of Rila among the greatest saints.

The nature view near monastery is breath taking .. On the road to it there is Struma river the monastery itself is situated in Vlahina mountain from it there is a sightview of part of Rila mountain.

piece-of-heaven-on-earth-near-ruenski-monastir

Near the monastery buildings there are two paths one leading to the Cave of Hermitage of Saint John of Rila and another one leading to a place with a Cross visible from throughout the region.

the-cross-on-top-of-mountain-ruenski-monastery

The monastery though being among the newest rebuilded ones in Bulgaria has already 3 saint holy relics, one of which is Holy relics from Saint George the Victorious. We had the blessings by God's grace to also meet RuenAbbot Father Ioan (John). We asked the father how many monks are inhabiting the monastery just to get the humorous answer that half of the inhabitants are present (meaning currently in the monastery there are only 2 monks). Fatehr John was evidently very young kindhearted  person  probably in his 30s. He was quite hospitable and invited us for tea and cookies in the small monastic dining room. We had quite a few spiritual talks and spoke on hardship of being a monk in nowadays confused world.

We were send with the Father's blessings and a gift – an icon of saint John of Rila and a book with the history of the monastery from ancient times to now – the book included also the Testament of Saint John of Rila

On our way back before entering Boboshevo we stopped to see and pray near an ancient Church from the 5th century consecrated under saint Theodor (Stratilat) – a Christian martyr saint from the 4th century who lived near Black Sea.

church-saint-Theodor-stratilat-church-5th-century

The Church is an unique Cultural monument as it contains wall patings probably dating back to at least 10th century or even earlier.

sv-teodor-cyrkva-5-vek-bylgaria

Thanks God the weather was quite warm for the Winter season leaving impression Spring has come 🙂

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Christianity, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

Linux: Rename all files extension from upper to lower cases

Friday, February 14th, 2014

Lets say you're an admin involved in webhosting and due to a programmer's mistake, you end up with directory full with files with extension in upper cases but for actual version of website (all pictures are red only in lower cases), hence would like to transform these to lower cases.
To give an example, to illustrate what I mean, lets say you have in a directory files like;

filename.JPG, picture.PNG, new-picture.GIF

and you would like all files to be renamed to lower extension characters, i.e.:

filename.jpg, picture.png, new-picture.gif.
 

# find . -name '*.*' -exec sh -c 'a=$(echo {} | sed -r "s/([^.]*)\$/\L\1/"); [ "$a" != "{}" ] && mv "{}" "$a" ' \;

That's all enjoy 🙂

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various | No Comments »

Set up Modsecurity on Debian 7 GNU / Linux to mitigate websites virus infections / Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injects

Friday, September 6th, 2013

mod security raise up your Apache webserver security and protect against cross site scripting javascript hacks and viruses

There are plenty of tutorials around on how to install and configure modsecurity  So This tutorial is nothing new, but I decided to write it since, I had to install mod_security on Debian Wheezy to protect a Debian Linux server websites from being periodically infected with Viruses / XSS / Backdoored Javascripts and Trojan horses.

Everyone who used Debian stable distribution knows the packages included in it are usually about 2 years older than latest available. Situation with latest Debian stable Wheezy  is same, but anyways even a bit outdated my experience so far is mod_security does a great job of protecting Apache sites …

1. Install libapache-mod-security and other libraries (not obligitory), but useful on most Apache + PHP servers

  Run below commands to add xml and rest of useful Apache stuff:


apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev libxml2-utils
apt-get install libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dev

Above commands will install a bunch of other dependency packages.

Next install mod-security deb. Run below command, to install and activate modsecurity. Note that installing libapache-mod-security will also automatically restart the Apache server.
 

apt-get install libapache-mod-security

Next to enable all functionality of modsecurity headers Apache module is required as well, activate it with:

 
a2enmod headers
service apache2 restart

2. Make sure mod_security Apache config looks like

 

<IfModule security2_module>
# Default Debian dir for modsecurity's persistent data
SecDataDir /var/cache/modsecurity
# Include all the *.conf files in /etc/modsecurity.
# Keeping your local configuration in that directory
# will allow for an easy upgrade of THIS file and
# make your life easier
Include "/etc/modsecurity/*.conf"
</IfModule>

Important part of conf is  "Include "/etc/modsecurity/*.conf"" line. /etc/modsecurity directory is main place to set up and configure modsecurity. This configuration file, combined with mod-security.load, do everything necessary to load the modsecurity into Apache server.

3.Enable and Load modsecurity default configuration rules:

So far, modsecurity is loaded into the apache server, but isn't stopping any attempts of hack scripts / Viruses / or automated tools to exploit Vulnerabilities in Web Applications. To make modsecurity start filtering requests, should activate  modsecurity specific configuration and load some regular expression rules.
First to do is enable "recommended" modsecurity configuration file:
 

Code:
cd /etc/modsecurity
mv modsecurity.conf-recommended modsecurity.conf

Default configuration from recommended conf enables modsecurity in an "examine only" mode. In order to make full use of the module, we have to make a few changes. With  favorite text editor open modsecurity.conf (mine is vim)and make the following change:

Code:
SecRuleEngine On

This makes modsecurity to block requests based on its (pre-written) developer rules. Other settings in this file that are useful to know about are the debug controls, very useful, whether you have to debug problems with sites not properly opening due to server enabled mod_security.
 

Code:
#SecDebugLog /opt/modsecurity/var/log/debug.log
#SecDebugLogLevel 3

This controls how much information is stored in modsecurity's "audit log as well as keeps track of attacks launched to server. Default debug level of 3 is pretty much and stores "everything". This is dangerous as a huge logs are produces on  busy servers.
 

Code:
SecAuditLogParts ABIJDEFHZ

4. Enable extra modsecurity prevention rules

Modsecurity works by using rules by pre-defined patterns used to recognize when your website/s is being probed or attacked. Once installed modsecurity base package as a dependency modsecurity-crs package is installed. modsecurity-crs contains addition free core rule set. Current Core rule from modsecurity.org are newer than version included with wheezy,  thus rules lack a bit behind but this is only option whether using default debian bundled packge otherwise manual modsecurity recompile is required. We all know how bad it is to custom compile software on production machines, so custom compile experiments are really bad idea.

CRS (Core Rule Set) is installed in /usr/share/modsecurity-crs. This directory contains an "activated_rules" directory present also in /etc/modsecurity

Quickest way to activate rules is by symlinking from the actual config and rule files into the /etc/modsecurity config directory.

We'll be making links from the /usr/share/modsecurity location into /etc/modsecurity to activate some other useful modsec useful rules. First link main crs config file:
 

ln -s /usr/share/modsecurity-crs/modsecurity_crs_10_setup.conf /etc/modsecurity/modsecurity_crs_10_setup.conf

This file provides some basic configuration directives for crs.

Futher on, link each rule file in the base_rules and optional_rules directories using 2 tiny bash loops.
 

 
cd /usr/share/modsecurity-crs/base_rules
for f in * ; do sudo ln -s /usr/share/modsecurity-crs/base_rules/$f /etc/modsecurity/$f ; done
cd /usr/share/modsecurity-crs/optional_rules
for f in * ; do sudo ln -s /usr/share/modsecurity-crs/optional_rules/$f /etc/modsecurity/$f ; done

With that done, there's one more edit to check if modsecurity blocking works as expected. Open the /etc/modsecurity/modsecurity.conf file and add the following lines at the end (this is from the free, modsecurity pdf book, link provided below)
 

 
SecRule ARGS "MY_UNIQUE_TEST_STRING"\
"phase:1,log,deny,status:503"

Finally after all configuration rules are loaded to modsec, Usual Apache restart is required:

 
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Whether no fatal errors pop up and Apache starts normally, now modsecurity should be properly running.

5. Verify if modsecurity is set-up and kicking ass

To verify installation, open a browser and access some of hosted websites  like this:
http://www.your-server-domain.com/?test=MY_UNIQUE_TEST_STRING

A sure sign that modsec works is  503 "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message from Apache. Alternatively  examine server's modsec audit log file (default location in /var/log/apache2/modsec_audit.log) (grep the string MY_UNIQUE_TEST_STRING. You should see full transcript of the communication between your browser and server logged. Depending on amount of site traffic gets make sure to monitor  size of file for some minutes to make sure it doesn't grow too big and it doesn't fill up quickly your HDD.

Well now all fine your Apache server security is better for sure and by God's grace you should not have to deal with hundreds of hours of sites recovery after a bunch of client's websites are hacked.

Feedback and comments are mostly welcome. Enjoy 😉

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computer Security, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Newer Entries »