Long Time No Blog – Lots of changes

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Well its been a long time since I last graced myself with having to write a blog post, and I guess that is due to many reasons. One of them being the fact that I was away for 2 months in Australia for a little bit of business, and the other is that I have been busy adding new features to the site to make us one step above everyone else. Before I start talking about the new features that have either been introduced or will be introduced soon, I would like to set out the idea that this blog will receive at least 3 blog’s a week. However, only time will tell if I can actually keep up with that.

One of the big changes that has happened recently was the new website and the price structure changes. I think I will just tell people why we changed the prices a little. The reason for the change was because managing a cPanel system is so much easier than managing a system with no control panel or plesk, but we were charging the same price. This basically meant that it was hard for us lower response times and keep the quality high. We did not change the prices for clients on the old price plan because we have a policy that your price will never go up, only down!

Along with the new webdesign we have added a few new features and plans that will soon be hitting it big time (we hope). The first one of these I will talk about is reselling Softlayer servers. I have been a fan off Softlayer ever since I got my first server with them which was quite a while back now near when they started. So recently we started to resell their services with our administration slapped on top. We do not mark up the price of the server, and you get a discount on our administration plans. So everyone wins :D

One thing that I am excited about is the outsourcing, we have just started to offer outsourcing but with a bonus above everyone else. Every admin that is part of our outsourcing team has spent at least 4 months on the seeksadmin helpdesk, so you can be pretty sure they can deal with the hardest of problems. We believe we are competitively priced, what that means is that we are not the most expensive out there but not the cheapest.

I have a lot more news, but for now I will leave it at this and give me something to post about in future blogs.

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Basic SSH Security

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There are a few ways to sort server security, but one of the major ways to harden your server is to secure SSH. On a default machine you login as root directly, on the default port. This means you are susceptible to brute force and all other sorts of attacks. What I am going to write about is a short and simple guide about how to secure your SSH and what this does. You don’t have to do all of these although I would deeply recommend doing the steps below.
1. Changing SSH Protocol

I guess a good place to start would be what are the differences between the two SSH protocols (1 and 2), as not many people know this. You don’t need to know, but I think that you should know the reasons you are doing this. I will try to cut the crap out of it and keep it simple. Basically SSH2 uses separate protocols for transport, authentication and connections, splitting all your data up making it just that little bit more secure. It also has stronger cryptographic integrity checks and has better encryption. Basically what I am trying to say (but in tech talk) is that this is one change you should always make. Now lets get on to making the change.

Step 1) Use nano, pico or vi (your favorite text editor) to open up /etc/ssh/sshd_config for editing

Step 2) Find the Line #Protocol 2,1

Step 3) Uncomment the line and change it to

Protocol 2

2. Changing the SSH port

This is what we like to call security by obscurity, it is one extra thing the hacker has to guess before he can get in, although practically a port scan would be able to find the port. However i have found that changing the port does stop a lot of brute force attacks from occurring.

NOTE: Make sure you add the port you want to use to the firewall AND/or add yourself to the allow list so you can connect to the port and don’t lock yourself out.

Step 1) Again open up /etc/ssh/sshd_config with your favourite editor

Step 2) Find the line #Port 22

Step 3) Uncomment the line and replace with the following (where port 2777 is a random, unused port)

Port 2777

NB: To find out if the port is being used use the comand lsof -i:portnumber eg lsof -i:2777

3. Disable Direct Root Login

Unlike the other steps we have used this requires a bit more than editing the config file, but its not hard so dont worry about it. Again this is a little of security by obscurity adding an extra layer the hacker/cracker has to get through if he wants access to your machine, making that bit harder.

A lot of other guides you will see will tell you to add a cPanel account etc etc, but lets just make it easier shall we.

Step 1) Type the following in SSH replacing username with a random username eg sekadmin

adduser sekadmin

Step 2) Now lets give sekadmin a password

passwd sekadmin

You will now be given a password prompt twice. Make sure the word is not a dictionary word, I would recommend looking at my password article for the best password.

Step 3) Now we need to give sekadmin, the correct privileges so he can su – to root.

Step 4) Open up /etc/group with your favorite text editor. Find the line that starts with “wheel” and add your username on at the end of the line. Then close and save the file.

Step 5) Now you will need to test the login works so create a NEW ssh session and try to connect using the username that you just created. Once logged in type “su -” and then the root password to see if that works. If it works everything went ok and you continue on to the next step

Step 6) Once again open up our favourite file /etc/ssh/sshd_config in your text editor

Step 7) Find the line #PermitRootLogin yes, uncomment it and change it to no.

Other Methods

There are also some other methods that you can use. One of the other methods I like to use is binding SSH to an IP. If you do this, the best thing to do is use a spare IP that is not being used by a website. This will offer the most security.

Another great thing to do is to disable password logins totally and use an ssh key. I will not write anything about that here, because it can be a blog post on its own for a rainy day ;)

AFTER all changes

To make all your changes take effect you will have to restart ssh

service sshd restart

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Outsourced Support

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As one of our new features is outsourced support I thought I should say a bit about it. First off back in the day when I worked for a big hosting company at a datacenter, it was all on-site staff and they had a great thing for it and everyone was happy, but then the management changed and of course so did the staff. But instead of staying “on-site” they were one of the first hosting companies to start outsourcing.

Obviously at first this made me pretty angry, and I didn’t like the outsourcing market because they stole my job. But almost 8 years on now, I have had a lot of experience in many manners with outsourced staff. The experience I remember most was in 2002-04 where I was the team leader of a team which was outsourced so located in Pakistan. I obviously was not to thrilled, but I needed a job so could not turn it down. I was scared that their language would be terrible, that they would be lazy and not very skilled due to the low pay. I basically thought all of the bad things you could about outsourcing staff, but that all changed.

I will admit the first few weeks were a bit rough, fitting in and getting the staff to listen to me, but once we got over the first few hurdles I was pretty surprised. Firstly they were skilled and worked insanely hard – I would hire them over most other admins I have worked with, if I didn’t prefer on-site staff. They were efficient, quick, and learnt very quickly. Okay so that’s good you may say, but whats the point if their English is no good? Well… it was. It was pretty good. It was not as good and as fluent as someone who’s first language is English, and sometimes they sounded a bit over professional and not personal, but overall it was great. What was even better was that if I corrected them they never made the mistake again. It was like a dream team…. And there went my fear of outsourced hosting and I believe in it so much that I have even started offering it on our website.

Some companies do need on-site techs and it is a much better situation, but in my honest opinion, for the smaller companies it is a much better situation, its more cost efficient and allows companies to focus on other things, like sales or new services. I guess this post was for once a bit of an “advertisement” so I think I will cap it off with if you have any problems or questions, just ask us. We can even set up interviews now for outsourced staff, so it would just be like hiring your own staff member.

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Passwords

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A common problem for many people is remembering their passwords and at the same time making it cryptic enough. I thought I would share my password “remembering” techniques with you, which will help you keep things secure. There are three main methods you can use and I will describe that below.

Rhythm/Pattern

Now it may sound weird to have rhythm in your password, but when you think about it, it isn’1 too strange. It is all about memory, and you are more likely to remember a password when it has some rhythm to it, that you can remember. For example remembering a password such as

sardines0012a

is not going to be easy. (At least I dont think so). Whereas if you have a password with rhythm/a pattern

sand00handx

its much easier to remember.

Words

Another method that can also be very easy to use is to remember a word and then add your birth date on the end. An example of this is

Seeksadmin1980

This is very effective and very easy to remember as its 2 very memorable facts. It is also pretty hard to guess unless you know what word I had use and what number (it doesnt have to be birthdate, it could be the date you ordered the server)

Pattern

Now this is my favorite and preferred method. This is also different to the pattern/rhythm method i described above. So what is it about? Well that’s pretty simple, you make a pattern on your key board. Here is an example

!@#$%67890

if you are very clever you will have noticed that is holding the shift key pressing 1 to 5 and then letting go of shift and pressing the rest of the numbers. It is very easy to remember as its just a pattern on the keyboard. It does not really require you to remember each number/letter just the pattern. The last example ill give is

zaqwsx.;[]‘/

Which is z -> q, w->x ,->[, ]->/. This type of password is pretty much impossible to guess, and yet in my opinion is one of the easiest to remember.

Other Tips

Vary the methods you use of remembering your passwords and of course vary the passwords you use. Whether its something simple such as changing 1 digit for each server or adding the server name on the end of the password, it is important that the servers have different passwords. If you have a secure password, this is one less way a hacker can gain access to your system.

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Simple Server Security

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I am sure many of you will be thinking that it is our job to secure your servers and you are right, but much of this you need to know and it will do no harm in you knowing. So if you don’t feel like you can do anything here, just open a ticket and we will do it for you. Everything here is pretty simple, and this will be good for anyone who wants to learn, and be slightly more independent.

This guide is mainly for WHM and cPanel as the things are made much easier with cPanel and WHM however we can do them even if you don’t have it.

1. Shell Limits

You should enable shell resource limits to prevent users from consuming all the server resources. DDOS exploits typically do this. A quick way to set this for people using WHM is in the root WHM reseller go to Shell Fork Bomb Protection

2. Background Process Killer (People using WHM)

In WHM enable each item in WHM -> Background Process Killer, to remove any IRCs or other malicious bots

3. Apache

In Apache RLimitCPU and RLimitMEM should be set to stop any spammers or DDOSers using all the processes on your server. You can do this in WHM in the Modify Apache Memory Usage page.

You should also make sure that mod_userdir is disabled apart from one main domain, or just make sure its disabled totally, otherwise hacks may use it to try and hide their activities.

You should also enable SUEXEC to reduce the risk of hackers accessing all your sites if the server is compromised.

4. PHP

In the php ini (you can find the location via a php info file) you should change enable_dl to Off. This prevents users from loading php modules that effect everyone on the server. Note: IF you use dynamic libs like ioncube you will have to load them directly from the php.ini

You should also change the disable functions to
disable_functions = show_source, system, shell_exec, passthru, exec, phpinfo, popen, proc_open
Some webscripts break with these so you may have to remove a few, but these scripts are dangerous

You need to make sure PHP open_basedir is enabled. In WHM you can do this via WHM -> Tweak Security -> php open_basedir tweak. This prevents PHP scripts from straying outside of their account.

PHPSuExec can reduce the risks of hackers accessing all the sites on the server via a compromised PHP web script. There are some side effects of this, but this is a much safer method. If your server is full I would not recommend it, but on
brand new servers this is the best thing to do as its safer.

5. Control Panel

Make sure your control panel is updated to the latest stable version regularly.

Make sure that SSL login is forced, ie the secure ports. In WHM you can do this via WHM -> Tweak Settings -> Always Redirect users to the ssl/tls ports when visiting /cpanel, /webmil etc.

Make sure boxtrapper is DISABLED. The reason for this is that if its enabled you can easily be listed in an RBL and usually has the effect of increasing overall spam load not reducing it.

Make sure you have some sort of limit of emails sent per hour.

Make sure users CAN NOT reset passwords via email.

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The Blog begins…

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Welcome to the SeeksAdmin blog, I decided to recreate my blog today in WordPress, as its in general a better and more secure solution.

The reason I have decided to create the blog was that I run my company in a more personal manner than most people, I prefer to get to know my clients, to find out what they want and what they need. That is why I have decided to create this blog so the people could get to know me as a person and about how I run the company. After all if you know the management of the company is like you are going to know a bit about the service you will receive.

Another reason for it is that I believe I can help my clients learn through the articles I post, whether that is learn about the solutions we offer or learn a little system administration, either way we want you to learn something along the way so you can share the enjoyment we have in doing this job.

I am not sure what else I can say so I will leave it at this point, and as I mentioned I will try to keep this updated on a almost daily basis.

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