HYPERAXE

While monitoring my cPanel/WHM server for the past few days, I noticed that my cPanel related services including the monitoring daemon “chksrvd” suddenly dies. It seems like only the LiteSpeed web server survives the problem and thus continues to serve my user’s requests. All other services such as Mail, DNS, etc. fails. What’s weird of it all is that my Server Status page states that all services are up and running, when the truth is almost all of them have died. Well, I suppose this is due to the “chksrvd” daemon not running, which is by the way the service monitoring app of cPanel. So this is probably why the Server Status page doesn’t give an accurate report of what services are really up or down.
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Today is Good Friday, and for me this is the most important day of the holy week for this is the day we commemorate the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Some may say that’s it’s Easter, and I heard some priest say this as well, but nevertheless everyday of this week should be equally important.

I had never really been so active on any religious activities but Aphilo is. Since I really can’t argue with her on not doing any religious practices, I oftentimes just join her if she does to these things..well, as the saying goes, “If you can’t beat them, join them.”.
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Some of my friends and I had put up a web hosting business a couple of years ago, not mainly for profit but just for the fun of it. We still don’t have that much customers but the numbers are slowly increasing to the point that made me realize that I should somehow learn the trade. I just thought, that there’s still so much to learn on Linux when it comes to web hosting.

We just subscribed to reseller accounts since we started the business, but just recently I felt that I am already tired of not having total control of our servers. Every little problem we had back then should be reported to our provider’s support team, when in fact I could have easily fixed it myself. So I decided that’s it’s just about time that I get our own server and do the dirty works myself. I started things out with a VPS, since a dedicated server would be an overkill for us in terms of pricing. At least with a VPS we tend to achieve total control of our services, and the same time still minimizing the cost. Moreover, we still don’t have that much customers to really go for a dedi at this point. We’ll just cross the bridge when we get there.
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My apologies to my friends and readers if this site has been down for several days. It’s not actually the server’s fault but mine. I decided to rebuild the server, and re-install everything just for a fresh start and unclutter a couple of services.

Moreover, work had taken much of my time for the past few days, so I wasn’t able to spend enough time to speed up the server rebuilding process. Anyway, though I still have a couple of services to install, optimize, and secure, this site should be ok now.

(This is just an update on LiteSpeed as I had used it for the past few days) 

The more I use LiteSpeed, the more I am having fun with it. Aside from the significant performance and speed I had noticed with my websites, its ease of administration and configuration also made life easier for me.

Here are a few things I like about LiteSpeed:

• Real Time Stats - Instead of monitoring server and network resources related to my web services, I am now able to see things easily through the admin console. This allows me to easily make a health check, and do the appropriate actions much quickly.
• Awstats Integration - Now adding up Awstats for your web sites is so easy with LiteSpeed. You just have to configure it as an add-on to your virtual host, and then type in some required configurations, and off you go on analyzing your web site statistics.
• Upgrades - It may be true that updating Apache on Linux servers can be easily achieved using yum, apt-get, or up2date, but on LiteSpeed updates and upgrades are done on the web console. Not only that, you can also easily revert to old versions, if you somehow get into trouble with the latest version. Moreover, I really like the fact that my web server emails me if an updated version is available. Isn’t that cool!?!
• Servlets - I haven’t tried this yet and would discuss about this on a separate post, but Googling around suggests that integrating Java support on LiteSpeed is just a matter of adding it up as an add-on just like in the case of Awstats.

That’s all for now, and as I may say, LiteSpeed really impresses me.

While checking one of my servers a few days ago, I discovered a lot of failed SSH logins from several remote servers. Right away, I checked to see if my server was compromised and I was glad to know that it wasn’t. Whew!

So as to protect myself to further brute force attacks, I decided to install DenyHosts.  It’s a simple python application that monitors your auth.log/secure.log for any login attempts and failures, and then adds the hosts that has registered a number of failed logins on your hosts.deny file. The number of failed login attempts is configurable for root and normal users before the IP source would be refused connection. Moreover, you can always purge the blocked hosts depending on your preference (e.g. 1 week, 1 month, etc.). It may never give me a 100% security breach protection for my server, but at least and additional layer of protection would definitely help. At least this would discourage brute force attackers from targeting your server and also save you some resources on login attempts. As the saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.