The recent update to nss-softokn breaks rpm/yum updates in CentOS 6. To restore functionality run these commands: For 64-bit: # wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/updates/x86_64/Packages/nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-19.el6_6.x86_64.rpm # rpm2cpio nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-19.el6_6.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv # cd lib64 # cp libfreeblpriv3.* /lib64 # yum update For 32-bit: # wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/updates/i386/Packages/nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-19.el6_6.i686.rpm # rpm2cpio nss-softokn-freebl-3.14.3-19.el6_6.i686.rpm | cpio -idmv # cd lib # cp libfreeblpriv3.* […]

After the recent global distributed botnet attack on WordPress installations that took down servers and broke into admin accounts, I thought I’d write a plugin to prevent it happening again. Distributed botnet attacks can come from multiple IP addresses and locations at the same time, so conventional IP-based lockouts are not effective (e.g. those found […]

MyBackup Pro from Rerware can be a very useful app to back up your phone – or transfer data between phones. I set it up to backup my Android phone on a nightly basis, but more often than not it fails to connect to their server and cannot upload the backup. I paid for the […]

I just thought I’d share a formula I worked out a few years ago when a client asked me to make sure his Paypal website payments were covering the Paypal fees – so that he got the full amount he was asking for. In the UK, Paypal standard fees are 3.4% plus 20p. So if […]

The list of fonts in the WordPress visual editor is quite short. There are plugins available to increase it, but I wanted to add my own custom font to the select dropdown. There’s no plugin hook for this, so it needs a little lateral thinking. Firstly, generate your webfont @font-face in the normal way – I […]

There are various guides online for setting up Postfix as a backup (hold and forward) mail server which knows which accounts are valid on the primary (to prevent backscatter spam, so it only accepts emails for actual accounts that exist on the primary mail server). All of them are slightly different and none of them […]

This is a quick script to process email bounces, for example from a mailing list so that users can be flagged up or unsubscribed when they have too many failures. The actual bounce identification will be done by Chris Fortune’s Bounce Handler, which you can download from: http://anti-spam-man.com/php_bouncehandler/ We require 3 files from that package: […]

I thought I’d write a quick script to keep an eye on which processes/users are using too many cpu cycles on my CentOS server. This checks the usage over the previous 5 minutes and emails a detailed list of cpu-hungry processes if it’s over the defined limit. Run it from cron to keep an eye on those […]

If you are getting any brute force attacks to your dovecot imap/pop3 server, install fail2ban to block the offenders. This works on CentOs 5.7. For other distributions, see the relevant websites. Firstly, install fail2ban. You should have the rpmforge repo from my previous post. Enable it first to install fail2ban: # cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ # vi […]

I wanted to create a simple drop-in script to add brute-force attempt blocking by IP address to my PHP/MySQL login scripts. It should be pretty simple to use. It needs a database to run off, you enter the database values and call the script (see usage) before login and on login failure (also before login […]