Author: Jim Blaich

This is one of those thigns that has been bothering me.  I want to limit who can access the wp-admin folder and hence the admin login script.  I've read about how to do it online but have had no positive results.  Apparently when Apache updated the software to 2.4 the game changed and how you use certain features that worked with 2.2 do not work with 2.4 and there's no certain way to testing this absolutely.  What I mean is that I can try them  and then see if I can log in but because of other issues with how apache 2.2 directives may interfere with 2.4 directives causing them all to fail it is not clear which ones correct.

With the samba issue resolved (by removing the mount to the other server) and testing for disconnects the same thing happens.  So, that didn't resolve it.  This has been ongoing for a long while and is quite disconcerting.  I have found a way to mitigate the impact of loosing the connection by using a linux program called "screen".  However this is not the perfect solution.  I have to remember to start it after each connect.  Then if I get a disconnect I need to restart it by attaching to the screen session.  Then I have control of the prior tasks. Since the attempt to resolve it last, I added a second gigabit network card (NIC) and tested more.  Same issue.  That means it isn't the NIC that was the issue. …

Just out of the blue I started getting disconnects both locally and over the internet when I used SSH.  For years prior to this everything just boomed along.  Nary an issue to speak of.  But all of the sudden out of the blue these disconnects started happening and the tasks that were running over SSH were dropped, often resulting in me taking a lot of extra effort to correct or restart the task. This is annoying.  And since it was random and even when something was happening down the channel and it would affect every device no matter what it was doing I've been growing disconcerted. I did look into this.  I tried to remember things that had changed.  Some of those changes were like: I picked up three used…

This error is quite common and has numerous causes. I've used samba on Linux for a long time. I've never seen this error. When I finally did have the error I went looking for a cause. A lot of people had answers but none of them resolved the issue for me. What I was doing was setting up a Proxmox virtualization server. It uses LXC. I also have a VLAN that doesn't route to the inside LAN. I needed to send backups of containers from the virtualization server to a backup server. Since I had UFW installed and configured I checked to see if the ports for SAMBA were open. They were not. I do not just open ports to any computer, even internally. So, I opened the necessary ports…

OK, Postfix is the main tool that I use to run my email services. The goal/hope is to be able to be low on the list of people that are hacked, unlike those that are part of the aggregation services such as gmail, outlook, and yahoo. Yahoo BTW had all their billion plus users hacked and didn't disclose that to us promptly. It would have remained hidden if it weren't for the sale. Postfix is a tool that allows you to run an email service right out of the box, but obviously there are things that must be done to make your email known to the rest of the world. If you don't let your server be known well, no mail will ever get to you. How do we let…

No, not a lesson in CyberSecurity.  Just a tale. I was working on setting secure shell (SSH) access to a remote computer from mine.  I've installed Linux on it and have enabled SSH access via RSA keys only.  That's the only real way of doing it properly.  Only allow users to come in (disallowing the root user) via SSH as long as they have the 4096bit RSA key locally on their computer that's registered with the remote computer. I'm using a few years old Watchguard firewall one that I've not had muhc experience with.  I managed to log into it as the administrator and to look at what it would take to get SSH port forwarded to the Linux computer in question. With that Watchguard I was able to set…

I've been going over a bunch of things these past two weeks and have had to deal with a bunch of guides that are just out of date.  One might think that the author is busy and the like.  OK, so be it.  But some of these guides are the only guides out there and some of this stuff is pretty complex. I was working on getting openvpn running on my pfsense router.  I wanted it to work with frootvpn.  As I searched around I found guides for PIA and a bunch of those guides were quite varied in how.  I watched youtube videos.  Those were even more varied.  None of the guides handled any sort of issue that might crop up. When I was putting together some asterisk servers…

Muscle Memory It's really a bitch.  It does have the consequence of producing some very bad results.  Working hard to get something done quickly to solve a problem that you aren't familiar with then finding the solution then putting that solution in place where you use muscle memory instead of thinking through the actual issue.  Here's what happened.  Man was I perplexed and when I discovered what I'd actually done was a pissed at myself. My main website is self hosted.  I use letsencrypt to provide the certificates.  Every so often you get a message that the certificate is out of date and needs to be renewed.  I did this by creating a script that runs via a cronjob off the root account every 2.5 months.  One script triggers as…