Digitalocean upgraded their Droplets hosting Offering

Good news for those looking for VPS hosting solution. Digitalocean has upgraded their droplet offering by increasing the diskpace and RAM at the same price point.

Here are the new Droplets package from Digitalocean:

The most interesting plan is Flexible droplets where you can resize the droplets at any time choosing between with RAM or vCPU at the same price point.

Benefit for existing customer:

Existing customer can enjoy the new price point by clicking “Resize” option to get the new offering from Digitalocean

Benefit for new customers:

New customer will enjoy USD10 giveaway when signing up with Digitalocean. Remember that Digitalocean charges by hour, so you can test drive their VPS in a few days and can decide whether you want to continue or not with their service without any penalty

Get Free PHP and MySQL Hosting with InfinityFree

For those who are seeking free web hosting to test their PHP / MySQL application can look into InfinityFree.net service which has interesting offers:

  • 99% uptime
  • No advertisement
  • PHP 7.0
  • MySQL 5.6
  • Includes FTP account access (rare !!)
  • Up to 10 Email Account
  • Apache 2.4 with .htaccess
  • 400 MySQL database
  • User can add their own domain
  • Free DNS service (including custom CNAME and MX record)
  • Unlimited Disk space and Bandwidth
  • Support Cloudflare CDN
  • Support SSL Certificate

The main advantages which entice me to InfinityFree are their support for SSL Certificate, 99% uptime guarantees and support for adding own domain name with their own free DNS.

The support for SSL certificate means that you can host Telegram Bot, Google Map web application and web app which utilizes OAuth API!

A rare sight for a completely free web hosting provider.

The only downside for InfinityFree is the free hosting only support up to 50,000 hits on the web server, which is fair by me as the free hosting could provide a good playground for Students and Web App Enthusiast to experiment with their code.

 

 

A Bash script for sending telegram messages in Linux

Would it be nice to be able to receive notification from your Linux system in Telegram?

t_logo

I’ve come up with a rudimentary bash script which lets you integrate the telegram-cli into your own script which is useful for sending messages or notification within automated process to your Telegram account.

The bash script is very useful when you want to send notification to your Telegram account. Example usage: notifying you instantly whenever a backup has been completed or whenever somebody logged into your system or if there’s a brute-force attempt to log into your SSH. Basically anything that you can imagine!

First Step: Install telegram-cli

The first step is to install the telegram-cli client on your Linux system. You may choose to:

  1. Build it on your own – using source code, or
  2. Install telegram-cli from *.deb (Ubuntu LTS only)

IMPORTANT: Please read on how to initialize and sign-in the telegram-cli and key in the required telegram “CODE” in your phone.

Second Step: Copy send-telegram.sh script to /usr/local/bin

You may copy this telegram bash script and chmod it to be executed from command line (up to you).

Download the script at: https://blog.mypapit.net/upload/files/send-telegram.sh.txt

#!/bin/bash
######
###
# telegram-cli bash script r0.1
# change 'to' to your own  Telegram account name
# by =  Mohammad Hafiz bin Ismail  [mypapit@gmail.com]
# url=  https://blog.mypapit.net/
###
######

## Replace 'to' with your account name

to=Replace_this_with_your-Telegram_account_name
##


function show_usage {

 echo "Usage $0 [message]"
 exit
}




if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
  show_usage
fi


telegram-cli -W -e "msg $to $1"

IMPORTANT: Do not forget to “chmod a+x” the “send-telegram.sh” script.
IMPORTANT: Change the “to” variable in the script to match your own Telegram username.

Third Step: Using the send-telegram.sh script

Using the send-telegram.sh is easy!

Once you’ve logged in and initialized your telegram-cli application. You only need to execute the “send-telegram.sh” to send instant messages to your Telegram account!

Just do this

wget -c https://blog.mypapit.net/upload/files/send-telegram.sh.txt
cp send-telegram.sh.txt /usr/local/bin/send-telegram.sh

Then chmod it, to make it executable,

sudo chmod a+x  /usr/local/bin/send-telegram.sh

IMPORTANT: Change the “to” variable in the send-telegram.sh script to match your own Telegram username.

sudo nano /usr/local/bin/send-telegram.sh

To test your telegram script, just make sure you’ve logged into Telegram and telegram-cli, and have entered the correct activation “CODE”. Read Step 1, if you are unsure.

Then you may try out the send-telegram.sh script

send-telegram.sh "this is my message"

To send telegram message with timestamp type:

send-telegram.sh "`date -I` : this is a message with timestamp"

What should I do next?

Use your imagination! You can integrate this script in crontab, or put it inside another another bash script or conditional operation, or even launch it from a web application, the potential is limitless.

Happy trying!

Securing SSH port and limiting IP address connection with Firewall in Ubuntu

UFW: Securing SSH
UFW or Uncomplicated Firewall is a firewall package in Ubuntu. UFW can be used to secure SSH ports in Ubuntu server.

In order to secure OpenSSH, we must first disable UFW and allow all SSH rule.

sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw delete allow ssh

Then we add IP Address to be allowed to connect to SSH port. In this case I assume that “192.168.1.10” would be allowed to be connected to the server. You can replace IP Address, with any IP Address that you prefer.

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.1.10 to any port ssh

You can also add other IP Address that can be connected to SSH port. In this case, I chose em>”172.25.100.1″.

sudo ufw allow from 172.25.100.1 to any port ssh

Alternatively, you could also specify port number and protocol

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.1.10 to any port 22 proto tcp

Only allow SSH connections from certain subnets

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.1.0/24 to any port 22 proto tcp

Note: Adding firewall rules to only allow SSH connection from certain subnets would increase the server security, further reducing brute-force attack.

Further Reading: Ubuntu Server Administrator Reference