IT Support Small Medium Business

As discussed in my earlier articles on how to secure wordpress server and other LAMP application servers (part I, part II), it is imperative to protect the big ‘L’ in the LAMP, the Linux host server itself. One main step is to restrict and secure access to the server. On a Linux server, OpenSSH (sometimes in couple with a VPN solution) is the most commonly vetted choice. It should be used in lieu of telnet and FTP.
The OpenSSH that comes with mainstream Linux distributions may not be as tailored as you want to afford maximum security you desired. This should not be much of a surprise, since any pre-packaged software needs to reach broader audience and wider range of use cases, plus the packager may not share the same information security principles as you and may assess the risks differently. Read the rest of this entry »

In part I of this article, we discussed how to secure wordpress server by applying PHP secure configurations such as to switch on safe_mode, and to switch off expose_php, enable_dl, and allow_url_fopen. This time we’ll cover more secure PHP configurations. Read the rest of this entry »

The DST timezone change for North America will come effective March 11, 2007 for the first time, as passed by US Congress in 2004. Fortunately, for Linux administrators and users, the Linux utilizes centralized database to store time zone information, namely, a package named ‘tzdata’. Actually, this is not entirely true, esp. for older Linux systems such as RHL 9, RHEL2, RHEL3, or even CentOS (RHEL AS) 4.1, 4..2. More details can be found in my latest post on how to prepare older Linux systems for 2007 DST changes.

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Today my family celebrated the Chinese New Year. My son received a bunch of red envelopes containing cash.  People in China get around ten days vacation in a row, borrowing some weekend days from the weeks prior to and after the New Year. The borrowing and pooling of weekend days are systematically organized and promoted by the government and honored by almost all businesses.

I am just glad it is Sunday so I don’t have to work while everybody else celebrates and kicks back. It is also neat to have morning to noon in the States equates to Chinese New Year’s Eve in China and afternoon equates to Chinese New Year.

The year of 2007 is finally & officially here for >= 1.3 billion Chinese. It is the year of pig. Here is a smiling one:

In Google Search, for a few queries my site is the only one or two links listed. The content-pirate sites sharing the same content don’t get listed or get hidden in ’similar links’.  Unlike Google Search, Yahoo! Search listed content-piracy sites side by side with the original site for the same content/page/post matching a search query, some are even as a few links ahead of this site.  Maybe that’s why much of the traffic to this small blog is referred by Google Search instead of Yahoo! Search. Read the rest of this entry »