Mar 222013
 

Finally spring is come, it’s a good time to start to go out and do some walks, or perhaps it’s a good moment to take a look at the best articles published on linuxaria.com during this cold winter.

This is a short list of the most read articles during last winter:

7 – The Importance of Securing a Linux Web Server

With the significant prevalence of Linux web servers globally, security is often touted as a strength of the platform for such a purpose. However, a Linux based web server is only as secure as its configuration and very often many are quite vulnerable to compromise. While specific configurations vary wildly due to environments or specific use, there are various general steps that can be taken to insure basic security considerations are in place.

Many risks are possible from a compromise including using the web server into a source of malware, creating a spam-sending relay, a web or TCP proxy, or other malicious activity. The operating system and packages can be fully patched with security updates and the server can still be compromised based purely on a poor security configuration. Security of web applications first begins with configuring the server itself with strict security in mind.
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Jan 302013
 

When you run a webserver behind a reverse proxy or HTTP accelerator such as Varnish, the webserver access logs will display the IP of the proxy (generally 127.0.0.1) instead of the end user’s IP.
This is a problem when you have a software like webalizer, awstats or similar log file analysis program, because you lose one of the most important information: “Who is the requestor of a page ?”, also having all the access coming from the same IP (127.0.0.1) you lose information such as “what’s the browsing pattern of visitors ?” “Is someone trying to do something Nasty ?”

In this small how-to I’ll show how to put this information back on your Nginx log files in 2 different ways.

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Dec 072012
 

This is an article of mine first published on Wazi

PHP is a widely-used language, it offers general purpose scripting that is well suited for Web development. It can be embedded into HTML, and is compatible with all major operating systems such as Linux, many Unix variants, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS and more.

It works with most major Web servers and it’s the scripting engine of many popular software such as Wordpess, Drupal, phpBB, mediaWiki, Joomla and Moodle just to name a few.

A thing that not everyone know is that you have different choice to run PHP on your Server, the most common option is the one used in the LAMP stack(Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP): mod_php, this is the more common way to have php working with your web server, but is not the only one and for someone is the worst in terms of performance, other options available are PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) and PHP FastCGI, another way of running a PHP script from a webserver could be ti use the traditional CGI method but for its poor performance this method is not used anymore

In this article I’ll show you the pros and cons of these different ways to use PHP with your webserver and as first thing I’ll give you a general suggestion to speed up the performance of your PHP.
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sslh – a ssl/ssh multiplexer for Linux

Sometimes you have some firewall that don’t allows you to accept connection other than some specific ports let’s say that you can connect on your VPS or remote server only on the ports 80 (http) and 443 (https), but you need a port also for ssh to manage your vps/server but the port 443 is [...]

Csync2 a filesystem syncronization tool for Linux

Sometimes is useful to sync automatically files over the net between 2 or more computers, maybe you want to keep some configuration files aligned on different servers or maybe you have a cluster of web servers and you want to keep their document root aligned so your customer will always see the same result. You [...]