Author Archives: vicki

About vicki

Welcome to the Sovereign Republic of Vickistan. I am the President here. Lucky me! No taxes or laws yet. Lucky you!

WordPress Stuff

Posted on January 13, 2014 by vicki

To change the admin username in WordPress: 1)Go into your phpmyadmin, and click on “Databases.” 2)Click on the name of your database. 3)Click the “Browse” icon next to wp_users. 4)Click the edit icon next to admin – should be first … Continue reading →

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Regular Expression Notes

Posted on January 1, 2014 by vicki

Explaining the following regular expression: (\d(3,4)[.-]?)+ ( starts a capturing group \ escapes the following character d end character shorthand (match any digit in the range 0 through 9 with \d) { open qualifier 3 minimum quantity to match , … Continue reading →

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Diagnosing SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length

Posted on December 19, 2013 by vicki

If you setup an ssl cert but are getting the following: SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. 1) Check that netstat -ntlp shows httpd listening on 443 2) Check that port 443 is open in iptables … Continue reading →

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Overriding php.ini values locally

Posted on December 11, 2013 by vicki

php directives are listed here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.list.php Modes determine when and where a PHP directive may or may not be set. This is explained here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.list.php A virtual host may be configured to use a local php.ini file in place of … Continue reading →

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MySQL Replication Tools

Posted on November 19, 2013 by vicki

If replication stops and the slave status shows: Last_Errno: 1580 Last_Error: Error ‘You cannot ‘ALTER’ a log table if logging is enabled’ on query. Default database: ‘mysql’. You need to skip over a bad query as follows: mysql> SET GLOBAL … Continue reading →

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MySQL went away errors

Posted on October 29, 2013 by vicki

This means that the server timed out and closed the connection. Two most common reasons (and fixes) for the MySQL server has gone away (error 2006) are: Your wait_timeout variable in your MySQL my.cnf configuration file is not large enough. … Continue reading →

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Creating multiple chroots

Posted on October 25, 2013 by vicki

Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config: 1. Comment out the Subsystem sftp line 2. Create line as follows: Subsystem sftp internal-sftp 3. Add the following at the bottom of the sshd_config file: Match Group sftponly ChrootDirectory %h X11Forwarding no AllowTCPForwarding no ForceCommand internal-sftp … Continue reading →

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Determining what security fixes have been backported

Posted on October 25, 2013 by vicki

RPM Command The rpm command can be used to determine what fixes have been backported as follows: rpm -q –changelog pkgname will show the package changelog, where vulnerabilities that have been patched in a package are listed.   Another place … Continue reading →

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Force phpMyAdmin to https

Posted on October 25, 2013 by vicki

1) Using Apache .htaccess (this can also be put in the httpd.conf if you don’t use .htaccess files): RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$ RewriteRule ^/directory(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/directory$1 [L,R] 2) Using phpMyAdmin’s config.inc.php file: ** place this at the end of the … Continue reading →

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Checking whether TRACE/TRACK are enabled in Apache

Posted on October 22, 2013 by vicki

curl -v -X TRACE http://www.yourserver.com Running it against an Apache server with TraceEnable Off correctly returns HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed (just tested on an Apache 2.2.22) This also works on HTTPS sites, provided that cURL has the correct information … Continue reading →

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