We’ve been having a blast with some new intel atom based pfSense firewalls here in the office. The d510 boards perform amazingly well, even with a slew of snort rules loaded up.

We just replaced one of our Juniper SRX series firewalls with one of these little pfSense boxes and wouldn’t you know one of our own snort rules blocked us. Here’s how we got back in:

Gain access to the pfSense shell. We could have walked over to the box but that involved standing up, placing one foot infront of the other and repeating again and again. Bah, who needs all that.

We SSHd to another machine, and from that machine we SSHd to a machine behind our firewall, and from that we SSHd to the LAN IP associated with our firewall. We logged in, chose option 8 (Local Shell), and did the following:

pfctl -t snort2c -T show

This will show you all the IPs that have been blocked by triggering a snort rule

Then run this to remove you IP

pfctl -t snort2c -T delete xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

You should add your own IPs to the whitelist to prevent this from happening again.

A few clients have recently complained about other blogs linking to their images and leeching off their bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive and should be protected.

Here’s a working solution:

location ~ \.(jpg|jpeg|bmp|jif|bmp|gif|png)$ {
                root   /path/to/public_html/;
                valid_referers server_names none blocked;
                if ($invalid_referer) {
                return 403;
                }
            }

Some sites will need to allow some other sites to link to their images. If this is the case you can use the following rewrites – just modify and add domains as required

location ~ \.(jpg|jpeg|bmp|jif|bmp|gif|png)$ {
                root   /path/to/public_html/;
                valid_referers server_names none blocked www.theothersite.com *.theothersite.com;
                if ($invalid_referer) {
                return 403;
                }
            }

You’ve asked, and we’ve listened!  We’ve made the following changes to our VPS Packages:

The VPS-Spark Package has received an additional 25 Gigabytes of bandwidth as well as an additional 128 Megabytes of RAM.

The VPS-Blaze Package has received an additional 25 Gigabytes of bandwidth as well as an additional 256 Megabytes of RAM.

The VPS-Inferno Package has received an additional 50 Gigabytes of bandwidth as well as an additional 256 Megabyte of RAM.

We hope you all enjoy the benefits of these additional resources.

WordPress 2.8.5 has hit the street. This release is dubbed a “hardening release” and applying it fixes a few potential vulnerabilities. We recommend that all clients upgrade to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/10/wordpress-2-8-5-hardening-release/

WHMCS is a very popular client management package with a slew of billing, support, and product management options. We use it here and have just recently moved our WHMCS site over to an nginx powered web server. The rewrites have all been worked out and since there’s nothing to be found on the subject via google we decided to share.

server {
            listen   80;
            server_name  my.uncorrupted.net;
            rewrite ^/(.*) https://my.uncorrupted.net/$1 permanent;
       }

server {
            listen   443;
            server_name my.uncorrupted.net;
            access_log /xxx/xxx/xxx/logs/access.log;
            error_log /xxx/xxx/xxx/logs/error.log;
	    	ssl on;
	    	ssl_certificate /xxx/xxx/xxx/.ssl/cert.pem;
	    	ssl_certificate_key /xxx/xxx/xxx/.ssl/key.pem;

            location /  {
                        root   /xxx/xxx/xxx/public_html/;
                        index  index.html index.php;
		    }

			location = /announcements {
        				rewrite ^  /announcements.php  last;
    		}

    		location /announcements/ {
        				rewrite  ^/announcements/([0-9]+)/[A-Za-z0-9_-]+\.html$ /announcements.php?id=$1 last;
    		}

    		location = /downloads {
        				rewrite ^  /downloads.php  last;
    		}

    		location /downloads/ {
        				rewrite ^/downloads/([0-9]+)/([^/]*)$ /downloads.php?action=displaycat&catid=$1 last;
    		}
			location = /knowledgebase {
       					rewrite ^  /knowledgebase.php  last;
    		}
			location /knowledgebase/ {
        				rewrite  ^/knowledgebase/([0-9]+)/[A-Za-z0-9_-]+\.html$ /knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=$1 last;
        				rewrite  ^/knowledgebase/([0-9]+)/([^/]*)$ /knowledgebase.php?action=displaycat&catid=$1 last;
    		}

            # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
            location ~ \.php$ {
            			fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
            			fastcgi_index index.php;
            			include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params;
            			fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /xxx/xxx/xxx/public_html/$fastcgi_script_name;
            }
}

Gest of luck – if you run into any issues write us a comment and we’ll see if we can help you work it out.

Have you heard?!

Here at Uncorrupted Hosting, when you use the coupon code – 5DollarsOff – you will receive the following perks:

* $5.00 off coupon ($5.00 off each month, for a year!)
* 30 day money back guarantee
* We’ll migrate you for…FREE…with no down time!

More is always better, right? So, once you’re signed up – wait a while. Then share your experience on your own blog, post a link back to Uncorrupted Hosting, and receive a FREE month of High Performance Hosting!

We look forward to serving you and hope to exceed your expectations!

This promotion is for new customers only.  We’ll be doing a separate promotion for existing customers soon!

As you’ve noticed we’ve changed our image a bit here at Uncorrupted Hosting. The design itself was done by Kyee @ Designed By Kye – he’s an amazing artist and a pleasure to deal with. If you’re looking to give your site a new look I suggest you check out Kyee’s portfolio.

We’ve always been about High Performance Hosting here at Uncorrupted, but we never pushed that as our niche… with the new design, we’re doing just that. Over the last few months we’ve gone through a complete metamorphosis – we’ve changed everything from our vision to our hardware, from our design to our network. We hope you’ll stay tuned for more information about or expanded (more economical) product line, our new hardware, and the crazy coupons/giveaways we’re about to release.

Yup, I’ve done what I always wanted to do… I’ve virtualized Uncorrupted. This was my goal from the begening, but I the servers I purchased did not support it… or so I thought. The Dell Servers I have are dual processor machines, but are single core and do not have the virtualization technology built it. One day, after pulling a server from the rack I decided to see what would happen if I tried installing XenServer on it. To my surprise the installation went through without a hitch – it warned me that because I didn’t have the hardware based virtualization support on the processors that I couldn’t run Windows based virtual machines… but who needs windows?

I really like XenServer 5 from Citrix, but I think I’m going to look at some other options. XenServer is now free, but it comes without the High Availability features and adding them would cost us about $2,300 – which is way over our budget. I would also like a web based interface so I can access and manage things from anywhere, and I’d like to sell VPSs – and customers definately need an interface to reload the OS, force a reboot, and get to a console in case of emergencies.

So why is a virtualized Uncorrupted a better thing? I can move the virtual servers over to a different physical machine if I need to replace hardware, add hardware, or patch XenServer… I can create backups and restore those backups quickly and easily (literally… 3 mouse clicks) in case of a hack or other emergency, and it’s just plain cool I can’t wait to see where this leads.

I’ve moved about 50 WordPress installations from various servers over the years and have found, what I consider, the “best practices”.   The goal here is to transfer your WordPress website off your current host’s server and (hopefully) onto one of the Uncorrupted Servers.   (more…)

If you’re reading this, you probably have your own website and you probably know that any changes you make to your DNS settings can take days to propagate throughout the internet – longer, if poorly configured DNS servers are involved.

The service the OpenDNS group provides is outstanding. Not only will using their DNS servers speed up your web browsing experience, but you can also create a (free) account and block any number of site categories (porn, gambling, phishing, adware, etc).

For those reasons alone, the switch is worth making. But, throw in their cache search & refresh capability and you’re left with a winning combo that everyone with a website can benefit from.

Cache?  Refresh? Ok…. so?

So, let’s say for instance you’re hosted by XYZ Hosting… their servers are over sold, your website is often unavailable, and when it is available it’s dog slow.  You want to leave, but are afraid of more down time and days wasted waiting for DNS to catch up.

If you’re using the OpenDNS servers, you can go to their website and perform a cache search – just tpe in your domain name and it will show you the IP addresses it has stored.  If you’ve recently changed, you can click on the refresh button and OpenDNS will instantly update ALL of their DNS servers with the new information. You can instantly get back to your website – on your new host.