Server Configuration

Linux Dominates Performance-based Computing Market Share Linux may be less susceptible to cyber-attacks because Windows presents such an attactive target by holding the majority of the desktop marketshare. However, Linux servers dominate the global market in some powerful ways. According to industry reports, Linux OSs comprise 100% of all supercomputers, and over 95% of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. Linux runs on 90% of all cloud infrastructure and dominates the mobile phone market with > 80% of market share. Embedded operating systems, and RTOS for IoT devices? Again, Linux is by far the most popular OS of choice. If you want more interesting facts about Linux’s market presence, you can Read Nick Galov’s revealing 2021 comprehensive summary of Linux market penetration. Knowing how to conduct a Security Audit of a Linux system and services is very important indeed.  This most often includes whitelisting required applications and…

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Security Of The Alexa Top Sites

Introduction The Alexa Top Websites (https://www.alexa.com/topsites) can be used to monitor the popularity trend of a website and compare the popularity of different websites (WikiPedia). In order to gauge the security posture of the internet as a whole mapping information from the Alexa Top Sites is useful. AlexaCheck.py assists by building a PostgreSQL database that stores header information from each website, the first listed resolved IP address, HTTP response code, and MX records. The header information also includes cookies that are passed during an initial connection. This approach was used to examine security of the Alexa Top Websites in a research paper CookiExt: Patching the Browser Against Session Hijacking Attacks. AlexaCheck.py can also accept a list of other domains you want to check for forced TLS encryption and inspect cookies and other header information. Specific HTTP Security Risks SSL/TLS Enforcement The Alexa Check database allows analysis of a particular website…

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How to Install Canvas LMS on Ubuntu 18.04

canvas-lms

Getting  Canvas LMS Pre-installed If you want to skip the installation of Canvas LMS and purchase a pre-installed VPS Canvas already installed, or alternatively, have a secure instance of Canvas LMS hosted on your own domain, please contact me by email  (joseph@ripplesoftware) or via contact page for more details. The full instructions for installing Canvas LMS on your own Ubuntu 18.04 server are below. Installing Canvas LMS on Ubuntu 18.04 8GB of ram is recommended for a server running Canvas LMS. However, it is possible that you can install and run Canvas LMS on a server with only 4GB or less. This installation was done on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu 18.04 VPS. Be sure to point your domain’s name-servers at your correct cloud host and edit your DNS networking so that your domain is pointed at your server before you begin. You can check using nslookup command as shown below….

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Update PHP 7.x to 7.4 CentOS 7 Remi Repo

WordPress 5.4 has been reminding admins to update PHP to 7.4.  Even if you are on PHP 7.1 you will receive the message in your dashboard.  Here are the instructions to upgrade from PHP 7.1 Remi Repo on Centos 7. READ FIRST — IMPORTANT !!! Get a complete backup snapshot of your server before you complete these update steps 1. First thing you should do is do any core OS updates and package updates. # yum update -y   2. Check which version of PHP you are currently running. # php -v PHP 7.1.33 (cli) (built: Oct 26 2019 10:16:23) ( NTS ) Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group Zend Engine v3.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies   3. Print a list to see all the PHP packages you have installed. You will need to replace all these packages in PHP 7.4. You should copy this list to a file…

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