Security - Xensoft

Redirect Web Traffic to Another Sub-domain (e.g. www) or HTTP to HTTPS

Using the mod_rewrite module you can configure Apache to redirect web traffic from one sub-domain to another. Usually used to redirect a bare domain (http://xensoft.com) to the www sub-domain (http://www.xensoft.com). First make sure you're loading the mod_rewrite module in your httpd.conf or

RPM

Use yum to Only Install Security Relevant Fixes

If you use yum to manage your server's packages and you're trying to keep things stable then only installing security relevant fixes makes a lot of sense. The yum-plugin-security package adds a plugin that makes keeping track of these things a snap: yum -y install yum-plugin-security Then you can list

CLI

Setup a Remote Shell over ICMP (ping)

There may be a tighter way to accomplish this, but these are the basic steps for setting up a remote shell over ICMP. remote First, on the remote system we setup some named pipes, and attach them to the STDIN and STDOUT (we also direct STDERR to STDIN) of a

Best Practices

Expand Shortened URLs

Here's a requested article. Have you ever run into a shortened URL and have no idea where on the World Wide Web it will take you? There are URL expansion services that will untangle the web of possible redirects and show you ultimately where the shortened URL will take you:

CLI

The Dangers of Copying and Pasting Commands from the Internet

What you see on a webpage isn't necessarily what you get when you copy something off it. Watch out for extra hidden logic, especially in "example commands" you might copy directly over to a prompt. The command below demonstrates the point, and is safe to run. It just

CLI

Automount an Encrypted Filesystem inside Dropbox

Download and setup Dropbox on your system: Get Dropbox For the encrypted filesystem I'm using EncFS which is a FUSE filesystem, so we'll need to install MacFUSE via: Download MacFUSE And if it's not already installed you'll need MacPorts: MacPorts Install Guide Then start by making sure MacPorts is up