I haven’t been doing a good job housekeeping my website. I recently discovered I was running a very old version of Ubuntu so it was time to dust off some linux skills and get crackin’ at porting my site to a new image.

One of the most tedious things about setting up a new site is making sure you have everything covered. I don’t have a script to automagically port one site to another. Instead, I’m going to dig through my bash history and capture everything I just did here.

I setup an SSL-enabled Apache server on Lightsail today in 15 minutes. I would have spent less time on it if I had gone directly to Let’s Encrypt, but I’ll share the steps in case anyone wants a quick-and-easy SSL-enabled web server. I’m using Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS so… you’re mileage may vary.

Continue reading Going Secure →

It happened yet again… I went back to the billing console in AWS and I realized my reserved instance was no longer reserved… my bill was double. Yay.

So I opted to check out Lightsail. It’s an AWS service that makes virtual private servers on the cloud easy. I opted for a relatively small instance to run my website and now I’m only paying $10 a month. I went with an Ubuntu image and it was easy to move all my bits from my previous reserved instance over to Lightsail. Now I’m not going to worry about my monthly bill surprising me next time!

I’ve been paying more attention to my log files lately. What I’ve found is not surprising, just disheartening. There are a number of requests by bots and script hackers to specific pages that have been regularly exploited in the past.

Aside from keeping my platform up-to-date (this includes Apache, Linux, WordPress, and so-on) I’ve been restricting access to these potentially unsafe resources and I’ve finally put together a script to automate denying compromised hosts access to the site.

Continue reading Cleaning up the blog even more →

I noticed the site was getting a lot of traffic and couldn’t figure out what was causing my sites to eventually become unresponsive. Since I have some free time on my hands I figured it would be a good time to look into it.

cat /var/log/apache2/*.access.log | cut -d'"' -f2,3 | awk '{print $4" "$2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | head

This resulted in A LOT of requests against xmlrpc.php. This is just my dinky little site but turns out there are a lot of script kids out there that like to hack up the xmlrpc.php to do their bidding. So I shut it off completely with an .htaccess directive.

And wouldn’t you know it… my apache2 processes haven’t spun up past 12 since I did it. I’ll get some updated photos up here soon too – I’d love to share some pics of the kids (and the fur kid) and maybe keep an actual running blog for a bit.

So entry first entry in over a year – complete!