May indian paypal users have been complaining that paypal withdrawal initiated between Jan 27 to Feb 3, 2010 have been subjected to delay and funds not credited in their indian bank accounts.

Infact, there has been a huge discussion thread in Digitalpoint forums talked about the same issue.

Paypal did issue email notification saying that there has been a issue with indian bank withdrawals.

Dear xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx,

We are currently experiencing an issue processing withdrawals to Indian bank
accounts. As a result, there may be …

In recent times, it seems that there is a new form of Dos (denial of service) attack, targeted towards dns servers. The attacker sends a dns query packet with a spoofed IP and your server will keep on sending responses to the victim.

More information about this attack is documented in this page.

If you are running a dns server with bind, your server might encounter such attacks.  You will need to harden your DNS server (bind) using the below steps.

1. Open …

Mod security is a web application firewall which protects apache from various types of attacks.

If you are using Centos/RHEL and tried to install mod_security, you may often get

No package found.

Here is how you make it to work.

1. Create a new file /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo

2. Place the following lines in that file.

[utterramblings]
name=Jason’s Utter Ramblings Repo
baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

Finally,

yum install mod_security

Important:
That should work. If you get 404 error then replace the correct enterprise linux version (4 or 5)

baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/

to

baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL5/$basearch/

If you are playing GTA 4 or GTA – Episodes from Liberty city in your Xbox 360 console, you will notice that everytime you shoot, the target will get automatically selected. This is quite a problem, because you will not be able to shoot cylinders or cars with free aim.

Here is how you get to free aim:

Just hold the RT button half-way (for about 40%) , point to the target and shoot. Remember! You have to keep on holding the …

If you have already added your credit card to paypal, then one day it is most likely to expire. All credit cards do have expiry date (once in every 3 yrs), which after that your credit card company will automatically renew and send you the new card (with  new secure code/CCV and expiry date). This may vary from country to country and the card issuer as well.

Just keep an eye on the expiry date, because if you dont update your …

I have seen in recent times, there are lot of brute force login failure attempts being bombarded on my ftp server running FTP service on port 21.  Every minute or so, my log file shows hundreds of login failure attempts per hour, with every combination.  Ever since from then i have been on a search for some kind of IP address blocking application that would automatically block IPs doing these brute force attempts.

I most frequently have used Proftp (or) Pure-ftp …

I have often noticed that while running ftp server with ProFTP there are strange f’s coming with ipadress like FFFF:11.33.44.99

I got this fixed by disabling IPv6 used by Proftp. Just put this one line in your proftp configuration file /etc/proftpd.conf

UseIPv6 off

You can see the changes while analysing the /var/log/secure log file for any login attempts.

If you running a FTP server (Pureftp/Proftp) in your linux server, it is very important to to enable passive mode,  because this mode, works best for ftp clients protected by firewall since the client initiates the connection.

If you are running a CSF firewall in your linux box, along with FTP server running Pure-ftp  or Proftp, just follow the below steps…

1. Add Passive Port range 30000-350000 to your Pureftp or Proftp configuration file

(i) Pureftpd

open /etc/pure-ftpd.conf, and this line

PassivePortRange    30000 35000

(ii) ProFTP

Open …

If you running older version of CSF firewall in your server, you might need to update to latest version to patch up for any security vulnerabilities.

Here is how you need to enable the auto update.

> nano /etc/csf/csf.conf

Then change the AUTO_UPDATES to ‘1′ and once this is done, the CSF will check each day for any updates.

# Enabling auto updates creates a cron job called /etc/cron.d/csf_update which
# runs once per day to see if there is an update to csf+lfd and …

I have seen this question asked again and again by many people, including in many linux forums and frankly, the answer is

yes,  if your server load goes above 1.0, certainly you should think about upgrading your server hardware. Watch out for your server load as sometime occasionally, it could be a sudden spike in which case no upgrade required. For any ideal server, you should always try to keep your server load below 1. Anything in 4.0 or 5.0 range …