Category Archives: Uncategorized

Centos7: “ldconfig : Aborted” error and how to deal with it

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On one of my recently installed servers I’ve got customer complain about ffmpeg missing some obscure shared libraries. I went to investigate and met some interesting case
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Sysadmin: How to install Letsencrypt on CentOS


Since Letsencrypt started their services life became much easier (or less). You can get free valid and secure SSL certificates that are recognized by majority of browsers, but for that you need to do some initial configuration and keep in mind that if you don’t renew all these nice certificates will turn into pumpkin after 2 month.
Here is the one liner command to install certbot-auto in CentOS 6 (requires additional Python 2.7 from EPEL repo)

Almost, the same for the CentOS 7 just without Python.

Here is how quickly request/retrieve certificate for your website on domain.com that is hosted under /home/domain/public_html from command line (presuming that the site is answering on this server already e.g. DNS and web server configured properly)

If the request was successful your new certificates could be accessible from /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com, where
privkey.pem – is the certificate key, cert.pem – bare certificate fullchain.pem – certificate along with the whole CA chain.
Don’t forget that these are valid for 2 month only. You’ll need to run

after that to get valid certificates.

Sysadmin: check massive list of urls for HTTP status code reply in single line

As I mentioned in previous post I did a few upgrades to EasyApache4 on couple of WHM/cPanel servers recently. While providing with an impressive list of advantages this upgrade could render some of the hosted sites offline because of missing PHP modules and incompatible PHP versions. In order to minimize the downtime all hosted sites has to be verified for availability. There could be easily hundreds of web sites hosted on single WHM/cPanel server and checking all of them manually will take a lot of time. In Linux almost anything could be automated.
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Sysadmin: Brute force detection – custom rule for SMTP and SSH

I wrote before about excellent tool BFD that allows to block brute force password guessing attempts on different network services.
I prefer it to Fail2ban because of portability (bash script) system resource consumption (bash script!) and extendĐ°bility (true “unix way” modularity).
I also wrote before a brief instruction on how to extend BFD with your own rule to fight with apache/Wordpress DOS attack.
In this post I will show you how to write custom rules to block SMTP password guessing brute force attempts and SSSHD

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