Blog Archives

Is your WordPress site embedding tracking code without your knowledge?

I just stumbled upon a couple of important articles relating to the WordPress Stats plugin available for free to all wordpress users and gives a sort of cut down Google Analytics functionality. i found the articles because i was googling as to why all of a sudden my sites were loading a file from quantserve.com,

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Posted in General, Performance & Optimisation, Security
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HOWTO: Upgrade Debian Lenny (5.0) to Debian Squeeze (6.0) on VPS.net

Here are the working upgrade instructions from Lenny to Squeeze (Debian 6) on VPS.net.

Disclaimer: please test this yourself first on a NON PRODUCTION SERVER. this may or may not work with other server providers but is specifically tailored to the VPS.net system,

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Posted in HOWTO's, Tutorials
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Mobile Broadband makes you efficient

Well i am back! just about, not been here posting lately and its not without good reasons too, the obvious one is i went to Zimbabwe for 3 weeks over christmas and GOT MARRIED!!!

some others may have wondered why its taken me so long to get this up and posted but that too is not without a good reason either.

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Posted in General, Personal, Tech
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Email alerts whenever someone logs into root via SSH

Want to be notified instantly when someone logs into your server as root? No problem. there was recently a discussion over on the vps.net forums after an incident where a user had had several of there servers logged into as root by an unknown source (since resolved) a helpful user (R4Z0R49) posted this helpful guide and I have cleaned it up and added some further notes and caveats.

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Posted in HOWTO's, Security, Tutorials
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Online Business – Be careful who you trust!

I have been sat on this one for a while, I had been thinking whether it was worth actually posting this or not, because one way or another it would become a name and shame article. As a freelancer, the long and short generally is – Time = Money. Time not spent working is possible Money not earned and when your freelancing its more critical than ever because you often are never sure when the next pay cheque is going to arrive.

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Posted in General
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SSH Root Security Tips

ok so i thought i would shove a quick techy thing up while its fresh in my head. this post i think is great when you are in an environment where you have to compromise on security and ease of use. I have to admit though, this tip is not my own i read this originally on Jordan Bedwell’s (Envygeeks) site however the site no longer seems to be available and i havent yet found it anywhere else.

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Posted in HOWTO's, Security
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Linux Securing your /tmp directory

its recently been noted that lots of people having there servers hacked because they were running vulnerable versions of PHPMyAdmin. obviously the best advice to fix this is to upgrade your PMA install to the latest version or to otherwise protect it with passwords etc (apache passwords not just the db passwords).

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Posted in HOWTO's, Security
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Welcome

welcome to the first draft of the new site! at this moment in time its the skeleton of hopefully what will grow into a much more polished site and resource for your systems administration needs or otherwise. As such please do watch out for falling (or should i say failing!) admins as this site undergoes the various tweaks to make it look so much better that it does now.

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Posted in General
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Installing Hugs98 (Haskell) on Mac 10.6 Snow Leopard

i have to use a program called hugs as part of one of my university modules, getting it installed on my mac proved to be a challenge, but i got it working. here is a brief guide on getting it working on 10.6. NOTE: if you are a 10.5 user the default macports install should be fine for you.

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Posted in Tech
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DotDeb updates: Repo now GPG signed!

i know its actually slightly older news but its worth sharing anyway, the DotDeb repositories are now GPG signed so you can be more assured that the mirrors are as safe and secure as the central mirror and you also dont have to worry about the this repository is not encrypted/signed error any more.

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Posted in General, HOWTO's, Tutorials
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