Platonic

Ultimately nothing is secure and it depends on our risk taking capacity to go ahead with what we have got.

Few of my friends from The Wifi-Hack have been quite busy testing Chrome and they also found few news updates from security hackers and watchers community. A new post on their website describes how Chrome is prone to vulnerabilities and the proof added by Aviv Raff researcher.The complete story is really interesting to read. A security flaw introduced in in Chrome has already been fixed by Apple Safari team. Why did not they took care of it or use the updated code before making this product available for the world? Anyways, nice to watch the hackers play in here. Digging more along with them!

I have documented the same in Kannada here.

Today I was unable to start apache on one of the VPS servers. Here is the error_log output.

[Thu Aug 28 16:45:02 2008] [warn] pid file /var/run/apache2.pid overwritten — Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Thu Aug 28 16:45:02 2008] [notice] Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) configured — resuming normal operations
[Thu Aug 28 16:45:02 2008] [alert] (12)Cannot allocate memory: apr_thread_create: unable to create worker thread
[Thu Aug 28 16:45:02 2008] [alert] (12)Cannot allocate memory: apr_thread_create: unable to create worker thread
[Thu Aug 28 16:45:04 2008] [alert] No active workers found… Apache is exiting!

As a sysadmin first you should check the user_beancounters information on the hardware node get more inputs about the resource usage of the VPS to understand what might be causing the memory issue. This is how you can find the user_beancounters

cat /proc/user_beancounters

Normally you will find the failure counts for privvmpages.

privvmpages 4052 49146 49152 53575 20

In the above line last column shows the number of times VPS crossed the limit set for privvmpages.

You can change this value if you have the access to hardware node as follows:

vzctl set –privvmpages 100000 –save

VEID is the VPS number allocated on hardware node.

vzlist | grep will get you that number.

Now, take a scenario where in you have no access to VPS hardware node and you stilll want this issue to be fixed from your end.

Here is the fix:
You can force Apache to use far less memory than what ever it is using now by installing apache2-mpm-prefork instead of apache2-mpm-worker.

All that I did on the console of my Debian server to get this fix this issue is running the following command:

#aptitude install apache2-mpm-prefork

I restarted apache and it started working just fine.

Couple of weeks back few of Fedora servers have been compromised or there was a security breach. It has been confirmed by Fedora project leader via mailing list post. This security breach has compromised OpenSSH packages on Fedora distributions. The issue is being investigated by Fedora team.

Today here is an another update from Security Tracker:

OpenSSH for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Packages May Have Been Compromised

RedHat confirms that this compromise does not affect the content distributed via Red Hat Network.

Solution: Red Hat has issued a fix.

Red Hat has published a list of the tampered packages and how to detect them at:

http://www.redhat.com/security/data/openssh-blacklist.html

The Red Hat advisory is available at:

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0855.html

I thought I will have a great Sunday and sleep for long hours. I was stuck with a networking issue on one of the HyperVM Server. Ips of VE’s were not pinging from outside world. All due to misconfiguration of SonicWall firewall and also the weird CentOS 5.2 nightmares. It was a challenge to look through all the logs, VE configuration etc.

Still the reported on network restart, VZ restart errors are on server which is running on latest CentOS 5.2, they do not seem to be troubling the health of VE’s created at the moment. Got a chance to rebuild the VPS nodes, Fix the /dev partition from back end as well as from the HyperVM front end, Blocking and Unblocking IPs on HyperVM and LXAdmin. Use of ippools instead of direct ip allocation (Both didn’t seem to have created issue on the server though). Playing with ARP cache was fun. It was a great hackathon for a day or two. Though there is an another challenging task in front of me.

I never got to keep my self awake like this for couple of months now after starting to work out at Gym ;). I used to be an Insomniac but now, things have changed. I get to sleep a lot at least for 6 hours. Today I thought I will be back to the old biological cycle but now as everything is fixed, I’m desperate to hit the sack.

Eager to get on to work floor in night shift to start with my 6th year operation in my company.

PhpSecInfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. It is not a replacement for secure development techniques, and does not do any kind of code or app auditing, but can be a useful tool in a multilayered security approach.

PhpSecInfo is released under the “New BSD” license. View the LICENSE file for more details

Development of PhpSecInfo is being sponsored in part by CERIAS at Purdue University.

Its not yet over. Yesterday serial bomb blasts shook the entire city and today an another live bomb was found near the shopping mall where I used to hang around last year. “The Forum” is one of the famous shopping mall in Koramangala. Its very close to the locations where in bombs exploded yesterday.

An unidentified 20 year old guy was found to have been placing the bomb in footpath near the shopping mall. Authorities are in search of this man wearing a Red T-Shirt.

Its all a mess in the city. Traffic jams, mobile networks have been jammed, IT companies hit along with those who give daily wages to so many people around the city. Though life started off as usual this morning, terror is still on in mind of Bangalorians. It used to be a green and fun filled city. You can say now its also filled with low-intensity bombs to horrify common man.

Why people are playing around with the lives of others? Whats behind all this? Terror is not the solution for all. Live and let us live peacefully.

News sources : Hindu NDTV

Image source : NDTV