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3 Reasons Behind why I Hate CPanel Web Hosting

Adding Subdomain / Domain creates a subdirectory
Adding Subdomain, and add-on Domain is a pain-in-the-ass as it creates a subdirectory in the root web directory, meaning that any web-users can abuse this by adding trailing subdirectory ‘subdomain’ http://yourdomain.com/subdomain/ to access http://subdomain.yourdomain.com/

Outdated Pre-package Software
Cpanel came with outdated pre-packaged software, PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL and other libraries that is outdated compared to the one available on the host operating system. The problem is not about how outdated the software packages are, but the how often these package are being patched. CPanel vendor very notorious for not providing timely patches which would compromise the security of the web application.

Can’t change DNS setting easily from the panel
Unlike DirectAdmin, CPanel does not offer an easy way to change DNS record of domain easily as the option is not offered by default to the control panel. Although this can be mitigated by having your domain points to a 3rd party NS, it’s still one of the thing that gets me down with CPanel.

My Thoughts
CPanel is an excellent control panel for beginner as it offers a lot of options and functionality with a simple user-interface. However, personally, I prefer to use other control panel such as DirectAdmin or Plesk for my web hosting use.

p/s: Currently I’m on VPS without standard control panel.

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Limiting the number of connections to SSH Server using Iptables

This is the quickest way to limit the number of connection to your SSH server with iptables.

[bash]
sudo /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –syn –dport 22 -m connlimit –connlimit-above 5 -j REJECT
[/bash]

This will only allow up to 5 concurrent connections to the SSH server, subsequent connections will be rejected by iptables, thus this can thwarts Brute-force attempts to your server.

More Articles About Securing SSH Server

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Upgrading to WordPress 3.2.1 and Disabling Bad Behavior

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.2.1 the latest bugfix to WordPress 3.2.x line which seems to improve the perfomance of the admin panel noticeably, probably due to the updated database scheme.

I’ve also decided to disable Bad Behavior plugin in my site, which was supposed to block most spammers, but since the rate of spams that I’ve received has been dropping for months and it did block some of the web surfers who surfed from large organizations (probably through proxies). So, dropping it entirely won’t hurt.

Hopefully this will make my posts more accessible to others, easily.

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How to Secure SSH server from Brute-Force and DDOS with Fail2ban ( Ubuntu )

Fail2ban is a security tool used for preventing brute-force attack and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to your GNU/Linux box.

Fail2ban monitors failed login attempts and subsequently blocks the ip address from further logins. Although Fail2ban can also be used to secure other services in Ubuntu server, in this post, I will only focus on securing SSH server.

Step 1: Install Fail2ban and (optionally) sendmail

sudo apt-get install fail2ban
sudo apt-get install sendmail-bin

Step 2: Setting up Fail2ban

Next, you need to configure fail2ban by creating a copy of ‘jail.conf’ to ‘jail.local’

cd /etc/fail2ban
sudo cp jail.conf jail.local

Step 3: General fail2ban configuration

Edit fail2ban configuration file using your favorite text-edito (I personally use ‘nano’)

sudo nano /etc/jail.local

You can set IP address for fail2ban to ignore, IP addresses can be separated by space.

Bantime is the duration of time that you want fail2ban to block suspicious attempt, the value is in seconds
Maxretry is the number of failed attempts before fail2ban block the IP-address, in this case 3600 means 1-hour ban

# "ignoreip" can be an IP address, a CIDR mask or a DNS host
ignoreip = 127.0.0.1 192.168.1.1
bantime  = 3600
maxretry = 3

Step 4: Enabling ssh and ssh-ddos protection
Find ssh configuration under [ssh] heading, and enable it.

[ssh]
enabled = true
port    = ssh
filter  = sshd
logpath  = /var/log/auth.log
maxretry = 3

Similarly, you can also enable [ssh-dos] protection by changing the enabled value to “enabled = true”

[ssh-ddos]
enabled = true
port    = ssh
filter  = sshd-ddos
logpath  = /var/log/auth.log
maxretry = 2

Step 5: Enable Sending Notification Email (optional)
Optionally you can have fail2ban sends you notification email in case of suspicious login detected. To do that, you need to locate destemail settings and changed it to your email

destemail = security@mypapit.net

Fail2ban can use ‘sendmail’ and ‘mail’ application to send notification email

Step 6: (Re-)start Fail2ban
After all is done, you may save the file, and (re)start the fail2ban service

sudo /etc/init.d/fail2ban restart

You can test the configuration by trying to login into your box. You may also check fail2ban log in /var/logs/auth.log (or in other directory specified in jail.local)

For more information about fail2ban, you can read : the official fail2ban manual

Recommended Reading

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Google Code Hosting now supports Git!

Great news to all developers out there! Google Code hosting service now supports Git in addition to Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial. Probably the top Google Code wishlish, I’m sure open source developers appreciates Google decision to offer Git support on its free open source code hosting service.

New and existing projects may continue to use SVN and Mercurial as version control and those who wished to switch to Git may do so from the “Administer” option in the Google Code Project Dashboard

Some note about Google Code Git support:

  • Requires at least Git 1.6.6
  • Repo size limit 4GiB
  • Push pack limit of 500 MiB (soon to be lifted)
Google Code Git

For more information about Git support in Google Code, please read: Google Code Git FAQ