Sunday, December 11, 2011

more on the new side project

So after looking around, asking a few people and doing a little reading I've updated www.ratsandrogues.com. Kind of funny that that is going faster than setting up rattis.net.

So yesterday, I set up WordPress, and re-wrote the two entries that were on the Rats and Rogues page. Then created two accounts. Then finally set up email using virtual domains (Postfix + Mysql + dovecot, etc).

Wish I could say it was all easy and simple. But it wasn't.

Problems I came across:
Wordpress:

1) www.ratsandrogues.com/feed wasn't working. The feed validator sites were saying not feed webpage. Going there got a 404 error.

2) If I set the url to be a custom for the entries, I could get a 404 error. But leaving the urls set as standard instead of custom would work.

2.5) the settings page for custom url said that .htaccess was not writable.

Solution
It looks like all three issues were related. One large problem with simple solutions but took forever to research.

2.5) created the .htaccess file in the root directory for the wordpress site. then changed ownership to the apache daemon user name.

That allowed the site's setting page to update the .htaccess file.

1 & 2) This one took more time, and lots more research. It looked like that .htaccess file was being ignored. I remember disabling .htaccess when I set up mod_security. Did some reading. I had set AllowOverride NONE in the config file, and I've had to make changes to the vhosts under that global directive. Once I changed that for only the Rats and Rogues site both the rewrites for custom URLS and the feed started working.

Email:
Uh this one was a mess.
1) getting the alias forwarding table to push to multiple people.
2) getting email to forward to the people above.

Solutions:
1) I searched around forever trying to figure out how to insert more than one name in the time. I saw some screen grabs that showed it but no idea how they did it. Then one webpage said that most use PHPMyAdmin. Yeah, didn't want to install that. To make it work:


INSERT INTO forwarding (`source`, `destination`) VALUES ('aliasemail@example.com', 'email1@example.com, email2@example.com');


Which is just the written out way of saying give the value of the 2 columns, 'source' and 'destination', with 2 elements. The first one is the alias email. the second one is a list of emails seperated by commas (,) between the single quotes (') for the second element.

2) With both names in the forwarding table, I gave it a test.

<user2@example.com> (expanded from <alias@example.com>): User
unknown in virtual alias table

<user1@example.com> (expanded from <alias@example.com>): User
unknown in virtual alias table


Fixing that required commenting out:

receive_override_options = no_address_mappings

in the Postfix main.cf

Which left me with:

User unknown in virtual alias table


which was there because while trying to fix the other problem I set the domain name in

virtual_alias_domains =


once I fixed that, everything worked.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Hey look I have new side project

The Rats and Rogues InfoSec Podcast.

www.ratsandrogues.com

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

new site isn't up.

So the last entry said, I was working on a new site. Sadly I haven't had the time to dedicate to it like I thought I would.

I also realized, I never got around to writing my review for the WIFU / OSWP class. Well.. that's not entirely true. I wrote one, but was never published. I was thinking yesterday about it for some reason, and was planning on writing a review last night from a slightly different perspective.

Now I just need to find the time.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

times change

So... I don't know.

I got my VPS up and running finally. Went with Linode. Had several friends speak highly of it. Went with a default Debian Squeeze install. Got it hardened as best I could. Now I'm getting ready to hit it with LAMP.

Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP.

I was thinking LEMP, (NginX instead of Apache), but since I'm going to be running Drupal, and really want an easy set up (follow the howtos and be working kind), I'm going to skip LEMP. Can always change later.

So what will this VPS be doing?
- Personal website. Blog, resume, photo gallory, email etc. Yes I said blog.
- Offer up a site to my martial arts school. Cheaper and more control than what they are using now. Using a CRM framework (drupal again) should make it easy enough to have updated.
- Maybe a site for the Locksport groups
- shell access for me. Mostly for IRC.
- Photo and video exchange site for the parkour group I'm in. Maybe.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

something fun.

Need to work up to clearing a standing student.

http://youtu.be/0LwQPLjihZw

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

bodyfat update

23.4%

244.6
43 inch at navel
45 inch hip
13 inch forearm
7 inch wrist

If I remember right, those are all down from last time, well except for the forearm..

Sunday, July 10, 2011

some days

Last night / this morning was a maintenance window at work. Lots of stuff to do. One call had about 30 people on it.

Now I'm the junior most member on my team. There are still things I don't know how to or can't do. Not that I don't know how. I mean I know how did them at my last job. Just don't know how we do them at this job. Can't because I don't have the needed access. Some of it I'm figuring out how to do work's way.

Anyway. there was an issue with an SSL cert. Really looks like someone sent us the wrong information in the turn up requests, since the same typo was in all of it (DNS and SSL). Anyway that got fixes late last night, but the people who were complaining didn't bother to test it. Ended paging everyone on my team. The one that fixed it asked why I didn't test it. Which I was in the process of doing when the other people said to start making the pages. Really those should come from me, not other people. Anywho. The other guy on my team was able to take care of the DNS stuff. But man was he ranting (and rightfully so).

Then at the very end, I got a huge win. Something wasn't working. Looks like another case of bad info. I was able to fix it. Before I started looking at it I had no clue what to even do. I vaguely knew the problem was related to NAT and Routing.

But I really found the problem falling back on one of my older skills that I love to use. Its kind of funny really because I was mentioning on a forum yesterday how great that skill was.

The skill - Being able to set up, and read a packet capture (sniffing) with TCPDump in real time. Once I found out what the problem was, I fixed it. with about 60 seconds to go in the maintenance window. :)