Web News and Internet Information
What’s new in Parallels Plesk 9?
Parallels Plesk 9 for Windows brings a whole suite of new features to further enhance the popular hsoting control panel software. All of AUSWEB’s Windows VPS hosting solutions come with the option of installing Plesk 9 for only an additonal $29.95 per month.
Keeping your blog secure is extremely important these days. So much so that new installs of WordPress ask the user to create four security keys. These keys help ensure that the cookies placed in your browser when logged in are not easily de-coded by would be hacker sites.
Some pre-existing installs of WordPress may only have one or two security keys while others may have none.
“Beginning with Version 2.6, three (3) security keys, AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, and LOGGED_IN_KEY, were added to insure better encryption of information stored in the user’s cookies. Beginning with Version 2.7 a fourth key, NONCE_KEY, was added to this group.
You don’t have to remember the keys, just make them long and complicated or better yet, use the online generator. ”
If you have been using WordPress for a while, you may not have these keys in place and this could cause security issues. It’s a simple fix though.
WordPress has a tool to randomly generate the four keys. You can get yours at: http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/
Once you have them, open up your wp-config.php file and past them in. If you have one or two security keys already you can either replace them or just add in the new ones.
Save the file, re-upload it and you’re done.
You’ll probably have to re-login to your blog, but the security keys will now be in place and can help give you peace of mind.
Comodo Internet Security is a proactive suite which now includes both Firewall and AntiVirus software. You can download it for free or upgrade to Comodo Internet Security Pro free for 30 days.
ModSecurity is a web application firewall module designed for use with Apache web servers. It provides an increased level of server security by protecting the server from vulnerabilities present in web application code. This increased security is achieved by detecting and preventing possible attack fronts before they reach the actual application. It is now estimated that over 70% of all attacks on web servers are carried out at web application level, hence the need for more secure web hosting environment.
AUSWEB deploys ModSecurity on all of our shared Linux hosting solutions to ensure we are able to provide the most secure shared hosting environment possible for our clients. Whilst it is not a guaranteed solution to protect against all web vulnerabilities, it reduces the attack surface of our hosting environments and therefore reduces the chances of a security breach.
From time to time, having ModSecurity installed will mean clients may experience ip blocks if code on a client website is deemed insecure. These blocks can also occur when using applications that are attempting to communicate with the server in an insecure manner, which can be caused by trojans/viruses on your pc or other software programs or their plugins.
The Joomla project has announced the release of version 1.5.9 and recommends all users to upgrade as soon as possible. The release addresses one low level and one high level security issues, along with a number of performance tweaks and enhancements.
We strongly advise clients using Joomla to upgrade to this release. If you installed Joomla via Fantastico then the release should become available shortly via your Fantastico control panel. Alternatively you can install the update manually by following the instructions on the Joomla website.
http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5226-joomla-159-security-release-now-available.html
Well it’s been an exciting past few weeks (besides the Christmas and new years drunken activities) at Ausweb, We’re starting to move into some uncharted territory. We have primarily been a website hosting company, and we also provide dedicated server solutions for customers, Which we do (I think) very well. But now, as the industry changes, we must adapt.
If you keep tabs on the IT industry, you most probably have noticed the hype of late which has been hosting in a virtual environment. This basically gives you the advantage of having the features of a dedicated server, But not having your own physical hardware. It’s done by assigning things like disk space, memory and CPU allocation to customers and keeping them completely seperate from each other in “containers”, Virtual Private Servers are what you could call the new black in the hosting world.
A Blog hosting service called Journalspace has decided to pack up and sell up after recently loosing all of their data. It appears that no external backups were ever made for the six years of blogs which has been accumulating at a slow and steady pace. The owners of the website have turned to selling the domain on ebay.
The website says “There was no hardware failure” but rather that “Both drives are operating fine. The data was simply gone. Overwritten… Clearly we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry. So, after nearly six years, journalspace is nore more.”
There is some talks of sabotage as one of the Lagomorphics team has previously sabotaged some key servers several months ago after being caught stealing. So there is some possibillity that the same individual has again, caused trouble for the website.
I think everyone can learn from this lesson and thats BACK UP YOUR DATA.
Please ensure to read the following message carefully as there is important information about MySQL and Automated process killers in relation to the cPanel 11.24 upgrade.
MySQL Root Password
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With cPanel 11.24 now available, it is imperative to ensure that you have set your MySQL root password before upgrading to the latest version of cPanel. If you have previously skipped this step, you can set it now using the “MySQL Root Password” function in WebHost Manager. Failure to set a MySQL root password may cause database corruption on systems running MySQL 4.1 with InnoDB tables. Please set your MySQL root password as soon as possible to avoid any issues. Machines without a MySQL root password set allow access to any database by any user so it is imperative that a password is set as soon as possible.
If you have moved /root
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If you have set root’s home directory to something other than /root, you will need to copy .my.cnf from root’s home directory to /root/my.cnf. In the future, this process will be automated.
Automated process killers
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If you have a system in place that automatically kills processes taking up a lot of CPU time, you should disable them before running the cPanel update as the size of the update has triggered many of these systems. These process killers will kill updates or related process in the middle of the process and cause issues. If you have a failed update, you can force a re-update by running /scripts/upcp –force
After weeks of intense testing and feedback all the great new features and optimizations present in cPanel 11.24 EDGE and CURRENT are now in our RELEASE build. 11.24.4 includes many updates and enhancements that have been discussed in past posts. Now, those customers who prefer to use cPanel’s RELEASE build get to find out what all the buzz is about.
To find out more about all the optimizations and updates that 11.24.4 brings to the table please have a look here.
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/new-features.htm
cPanel, announced this week the release of version 11.24 of their industry leading server management software. Version 11.24 introduces a new initiative to cPanel’s software, cPanel Accelerated. cPanel Accelerated brings new features designed to decrease system resource usage and increase speed and performance significantly from previous versions.
A substantial portion of the codebase of cPanel and the x3 interface itself has been streamlined and made to perform better and require less bandwidth. Also available as part of cPanel Accelerated are two alternatives for DNS and IMAP. The NSD nameserver can reduce memory usage for DNS functions by up to 40% over BIND. On busy nameservers that can add up to a huge resource savings. Also included in version 11.24 is Dovecot IMAP as an alternative to Courier IMAP. Dovecot provides up to a 25% reduction in disk I/O as well as using between 10% to 70% less memory then Courier. Security has also been enhanced with the reworking of cPanel’s process monitoring daemon to include service specific verification which helps to improve the security of running processes. Backups are faster too. Pkgacct 8 has been reworked to become significantly faster then previous versions. That means you can safely backup your data and restore it, both incrementally & non-incrementally much more quickly then previous versions. This all adds up to increased performance, reduced resource usage and ultimately a more efficient webhosting operation for cPanel customers.
As of Thursday, 10/30/2008, 11.24 and all its new enhancements will be available in the CURRENT build of cPanel. 11.24 will then make its way into the STABLE tree later in November. The best part of upgrading to 11.24 is that it’s very simple. Also, many of the improvements introduced require no user interaction, they just work.
For more information on the improvements introduced in cPanel 11.24 please the following URL for more information.
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/new-features.htm
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