Tweet Hello there! In development, having a seamlessly integrated process where you can propagate your code through whatever QA, testing and development policy you have is invaluable and a definite time saver. We work with SVN as well as GIT code repository systems and have developed a web based system to “Export” or “Push” the [...] Read More
How to detect and mitigate DoS (Denial of Service) Attacks
Tweet Greetings, Occasionally with a very busy site, being behind a hefty web stack does not always have enough capacity to mitigate a significant surge in artificial (DoS) requests. Detecting and mitigating denial of service attacks is an important and time sensitive exercise that will determine the next mitigating steps that you may need to [...] Read More
SVN Offsite Backup Script : Secure offsite backup solution for SVN to Amazon S3
Tweet Hi there! Backing up your code repository is important. Backing up your code repository to an off-site location in a secure manner is imperative. Throughout our travels and experience utilizing the SVN code repository system, we have developed a quick bash script to export the entire SVN repository, encrypt it, compress it into an [...] Read More
SVN Pre Commit Hook : Sanitize your Code!
Tweet Hello, Dealing with several different development environments can be tricky. With SVN specifically, it is ideal to have some “pre-flight” checks in order to make sure some basic standards have been followed. Some of the things you would want to check might be : - Does the code generate a fatal PHP error? - [...] Read More
Add your Dynamic IPs to Apache HTACCESS files
Tweet Hello! We threw together a quick & simple script to dynamically update your .htaccess files within apache to add your dynamic IP address to the allow / deny fields. If you’re looking to password protect an admin area (for example) but your office only has a dynamic IP address, then this script might be [...] Read More
Automated Amazon EBS snapshot backup script with 7 day retention
Tweet Hello there! We have recently been implementing several different backup strategies for properties that reside on the Amazon cloud platform. These strategies include scripts that incorporate s3sync and s3fs for offsite or redundant “limitless” backup storage capabilities. One of the more recent strategies we have implemented for several clients is an automated Amazon EBS [...] Read More
Massive Amazon Route53 API Bind Zone Import Script
Tweet Hello there, Occasionally some of our managed services work has us dealing directly with other cloud providers such as Amazon. One of our clients set a requirement to migrate over 5,000 domain’s to Amazon’s Route53 DNS service. There was little doubt that this could be automated, but since we have never done this massive [...] Read More
Checking and repairing mysql replication automatically
Tweet Hello! MySQL replication has been known to easily break, as a result of a large multitude of potential causes. Sometimes the replication can even break if an erroneous query is executed on the master server. With all the potential issues that may break replication, we thought it prudent to write an automated check script [...] Read More
Backup, compress and encrpyt your git repository
Tweet Greetings, I thought I’d share a quick script in the scope of backing up GIT repositories for the purposes of encrypted and compressed off-site backups. Unfortunately git does not have an equivalent of svnadmin dump or export, which can conveniently be piped to stdout. What the above scenario would do is shorten the amount [...] Read More
Centralized remote backup script with SSH key authentication
Tweet Greetings, It has been a while since we posted any useful tidbits for you , so we have decided to share one of our quick & dirty centralized backup scripts. The script relies on ssh key based authentication, described here on this blog. It essentially parses a configuration file where each variable is separated [...] Read More
Security Penetration Testing Series : SQL Injection
Tweet I am starting a series of blog posts that detail security related strategies, penetration testing and best practice methodologies. To start our series, I am going to delve into the world of SQL injection techniques and a general overview for those who are looking to learn a little more about this method of injection. [...] Read More
Automatically Deploy Debian Load Balancers with bash scripting
Tweet In yet another post in our automation series, we will share a bash script that automates the deployment of debian based load balancers (specifically with LVS / Linux Virtual Server project). Even though the environments and systems you deploy may start to get more complicated such as with load balancers, there will always be [...] Read More
Automatically Deploy Debian Firewalls with bash scripting
Tweet Automation is as necessary as any other aspect of systems administration in any critical or production environment where growth and scalability are moving at a significant pace. Growth in any organization is obviously a good thing. In the systems administrator’s perspective, however, growth can mean more time spent deploying systems and less time spent [...] Read More
Patch Scanning / Information Gathering Script for RedHat / CentOS
Tweet With all the patch management solutions, local repositories and other options, it is rarely necessary to manually scan all servers on your network to build a “report” of the patch levels in your environment. Sometimes it is, however. For instance, if you are brought into an environment that has not been properly managed and [...] Read More
How to backup Xen with Logical Volume Mounts ; Works with HyperVM, SolusVM, FluidVM and More
Through our research and implementation of many Xen environments, it has become necessary to develop a reliable and secure method for backing up our Xen instances that are mounted on Logical Volumes (LVM). Read More
Amazon S3 Backup script with encryption
Tweet With the advent of cloud computing, there have been several advances as far as commercial cloud offerings, most notably Amazon’s EC2 computing platform as well as their S3 Storage platform. Backing up to Amazon S3 has become a popular alternative to achieving true offsite backup capabilities for many organizations. The fast data transfer speeds [...] Read More
Compress files and folders over the network without using rsync
The following command ssh's to your remote server, tar + gzips a directory, and then outputs the compressed stream to your local machine. Read More
Script to distribute SSH Keys across many servers
The idea behind this script is to have a centralized, highly secure and restricted key repository server. Each server in your environment would run this script to "pull" the updated key list from the central server. The script would run as a cron job and can run as often as you like. Ideally every 5-10 minutes would allow for quick key updates / distribution. Read More
Manage Nagios with Scripts
Tweet Working at many different organisations over the past 10 years, I have been involved in the implementation and maintenance of many different monitoring implementations. These include commercial and open source implementations, such as : - Nagios - IP Monitor - Uptime - OpenNMS - Zabbix Although Nagios may not be the most scalable or [...] Read More
Network Audit Bash Script Using Netbios and Nmap
In order to quickly audit a network , I created this bash script to scan selected IPs, read from a configuration file, and compile a simple report to be emailed. The script can be modified to suit your needs, such as exporting the data to a database or perhaps an HTML report for a web based reporting site. Read More
Log compression Bash script
In my experience as a Systems Administrator, it has come up quite often to create a script to rotate and compress rather large log files. Read More