Incremental banning with Fail2Ban

Fail2Ban is a useful tool to keep bad traffic away from your server or VPS. It scans log files for suspicious entries (like failed password entries for SSH logins) and can ban the IPs of these attackers automatically. Naturally if a bot from a certain IP continues to attempt to attack your server or VPS, […]

Stop Spam from Google Groups

I’ve been receiving spam for a while that somehow my email provider’s spam filters wouldn’t or couldn’t filter. I had noticed they were somehow send through Google Groups, but couldn’t quite figure out how. Well it turns out that anyone is apparently free to start a group for their own use and then “invite” anyone […]

Two factor authentication: just do it!

This post on Wired editor’s Mat Honan’s blog had me worried. While there are plenty of things you could blame him from doing wrong (mainly not having backups even though the OS he was using makes this extremely easy) the thought of somebody being able to just wipe everything is frightening. While to my knowledge […]

Hiding MySQL/PostgreSQL password from the “ps” command

If you want to run a database tool for MySQL from the command line it would seem you cannot avoid including the password using a –password argument. The problem is that the whole command line while the command is being run will be visible to any other user of the same server using the “ps” […]