Tech, filmmaking, & thoughts.
Tech
How to install Memcached
Feb 8th
This guide will help you setup Memcached on a CentOS server.
What is cachingBefore diving into Memcache specifically, let’s take a step back. What is caching? Why should you care and why should you use it? Caching is used for two very important reasons: to speed up the delivery of the pages and to alleviate system resources. Caching is used to speed up dynamic sites; database driven sites will benefit most form caching. Think about a WordPress site. Each page you visit is not an actually file, but rather an amalgamation of the theme, widgets, posts, footers, headers, etc… Each More >
Spoofed Bingbot attacks against WP
Feb 2nd
#Updates #02/04/12 – Revised wording to reinforce Bing’s perspective #02/02/12 – Modified block code to identify bingbot as ‘badbingbot’ in case ‘bingbot’ is already being used somewhere
In the last 24 hours, I have seen a large scale attack on the admin logins for thousands of WordPress sites. The attackers are using the User Agent ‘Bingbot’. Bingbot certainly is NOT the culprit in these attacks, but is, unfortunately, being spoofed. These spoofing bots are attacking the wp-admin page. So far, I have only seen this affect WP Mage and Mage Monster users.
A brute force attack on any login is certainly undesirable; you More >
Auto fix for file permissions and ownership
Oct 22nd
#Updates: #01/26/2012 | New feature rich script written by Colin R.
suPHP and FastCGI require files and folders to have a specific set of permissions/ownership from other handlers. Without these permissions set you will see a lot of errors such as: “403 Forbidden”, “500 Internal Server Error”, or simply generic errors that commonly have the word ‘permission’ in them.
It can be very time consuming to track down and check file permissions across a whole server. Luckily, fixing this on a cPanel box can be scripted. This gives us a quick and very easy script you can wget to any cPanel server. More >
How to investigate an FTP hack
Feb 26th
If you have a website, there is a good change that one day you will get hacked. It happens. With so many possible ways to intercept connections & gain entry, you cannot safe guard them all, not permanently anyway. A determined intruder can get in. I myself have even had one of my cPanel accounts compromised. There are a number of methods for severely lowering the chances of an intrusion, but I will be saving that for it’s own article as it will be rather involved. For this article, I am going to show you how you can investigate a More >
DSO (mod_php) vs. CGI vs. suPHP vs. FastCGI
Jan 27th
#Updates: #02/12/12 | Added definitions #02/02/12 | Link clean up #12/30/11 | Added in link for ServInt blog #10/06/11 | better explanation for CGI with suEXEC
This is one of the most common topics that I see customers will ask about. As highly important as PHP handlers are, they often the least understood. They seem complicated, but its not too hard to understand. You don’t have to know that exact science of how it all works, but one should learn the basics if you want to take your website seriously. Picking the right PHP handler for your website will give you More >
