ServerBuddies Support Blog

Fail2ban 0.8

Brute-force break-in attempts are quite frequent against an SSH server and other password protected internet-services (such as ftp,pop,…). Automated scripts try multiple combinations of username/password (brute-force, dictionary attack) and sometimes changing the port to something other than the default can’t be done. Furthermore, scouring your log files yourself is not only time consuming, but can be difficult too.

Fail2ban attempts to alleviate these issues by providing an automated way of not only identifying possible break-in attempts, but acting upon them quickly and easily in a user-definable manner.

Log files contain interesting information, especially about failed logins. This information can be used to ban an offensive host. This is exactly what Fail2ban does. It scans log files and detects patterns which correspond to possible breakin attempts and then performs actions. Most of the time, it consists of adding a new rule in a firewall chain and sending an e-mail notification to the system administrator.

Here is a list of the most important features available in Fail2ban:

client/server
multithreaded
Gamin support
autodetection of the date/time format
wildcard support in logpath option
support for a lot of services (sshd, apache, qmail, proftpd, sasl, asterisk, etc)
support for several actions (iptables, tcp-wrapper, shorewall, mail notifications, etc)

Tags: Fail2ban

How long will cPanel & WHM support my chosen operating system?

Tags: cpanel, operating, support, System, WHM

Diagnosing resolution problems

Traceroute is a computer network diagnostic tool for displaying the route (path) and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
Traceroute outputs the list of traversed routers in simple text format, together with timing information

Traceroute is available on most operating systems.

On Linux:

If the last line of the output does not list 8.8.8.8 as the final hop, or if there are significant timeouts, there may be a network problem preventing you from contacting our servers.

Tags: Diagnosing, Problems, resolution

cPGS :: cPanel Game Servers

cPGS can be installed in WHM in the “Manage Plugins” section, remote servers can be installed after that using the remote server install feature in the “Gameserver Management” section of WHM.

cPGS won’t be officially supported until version 1.0.0.

This add on provides hosting companies the ability to offer popular game server hosting within the framework of cPanel®.What has been a traditionally tedious task has now been simplified for “point and click” simplicity.

Reference: http://cpgs.cpanel.net/

Tags: cPGS :: cPanel, Game, Servers

iptables/netfilter’s geoip match

Netfilter and iptables are building blocks of a framework inside the Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernel. This framework enables packet filtering, network addresss [and port] translation (NA[P]T) and other packet mangling. It is the re-designed and heavily improved successor of the previous Linux 2.2.x ipchains and Linux 2.0.x ipfwadm systems. To learn more about iptables/netfilter you should visit www.netfilter.org.

This framework is modular and easily let you extend the features. This is exactly what geoip is : an extension to iptables/netfilter that allows you to filter, nat or mangle packets based on the country’s destination or provenance.

Tags: geoip, iptables, match, netfilter's