Network Administration

Run cPanel On Your CMS Server? Verify Your Server Wasn't Compromised

13 years ago By Bryan Ruby

If you have ever hosted your website on a server or virtual private server then chances are pretty high you once did or currently are using cPanel. cPanel is a graphical web-based control panel that helps site owners and administrators to quickly and easily manage their website and hosting account. It's an awesome tool that interfaces with your server to help you perform once difficult tasks such as creating databases, manage website files, as well as setting up email accounts. Unfortunately, hackers broke into a proxy server used by cPanel, Inc's technical support department and now there are concerns that a trojan may have spread onto your server.

Quoting IT: Internet Outdated 2

18 years ago By Bryan Ruby

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television, I know because I designed it."

- Larry Roberts, ARPANet and Telnet founder, quoted in "Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies", Wall Street Journal, Oct 2, 2007

Is the Internet Ready to Break?

19 years ago By Bryan Ruby

This is another typical tech doomsday articles, but well worth the read. The article, Is the Internet Ready to Break?, was published in Baseline:

Reports of the Internet's death are greatly exaggerated. But the growth of video and broadband access will require new investment, technology and thinking to keep it healthy.

The fact is that if no one considered IT worst case scenarios we most likely wouldn't be able to prevent them or at least be prepared for the events. We have a couple words for that. It's called contingency planning.

Headaches from security updates for Firefox and Thunderbird

19 years ago By Bryan Ruby

Sigh...another round of security updates coming from the folks at Mozilla. It looks like version 1.5.0.7 will be at our doorsteps soon. Now at home, updating Firefox and Thunderbird on the Windows PC is a snap since it is all automatic. However, updating in a secure enterprise environment is a different matter.

In most enterprises, most users don't have administrative privileges and without those rights Firefox and Thunderbird in most cases will not auto install the new version. What would really help is if Mozilla would provide their software in a MSI package. Until MSI packages are provided by Mozilla, it is difficult for me to accept Firefox and Thunderbird as "enterprise software". In a Windows Server 2003 environment, MSI packages are a must for easy deployment, management, and auditing.

SMF has a server outage

19 years ago By Bryan Ruby

Those looking for SMF, a forum-based CMS, could not reach SMF's host server the past few days at Simple Machines. SMF's server was down for an extended period of time from July 22nd and 23rd. Thantos, one of the SMF developers, posted a message that only gave vague reasons for why there was a server outage:

The cause of the outage was the result of a non-technical issue involving our service provider. Failings happened on our both our part and their part. We have resolved the issue and are taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Akismet: Spam Stats

20 years ago By Bryan Ruby

I too have been seeing an increase in blog spam at some of our sister sites, especially those using Wordpress. Akismet, an anti-trackback spam group, is confirming the case in their own stats too. It looks to me that the spammers have declared a new war on many fronts. My theory, there are a lot of lonely servers on the University campus in the United States that are just sitting there now that the students have gone home for the summer.