Tag Cloud
Currently Reading
Latest Book Reviews
- Rancher Deep Dive Posted on March 31, 2023
- Leveraging Kustomize for Kubernetes Manifests Posted on March 24, 2023
- Automating Workflows with GitHub Actions Posted on October 13, 2022
- Deep-Dive Terraform on Azure Posted on August 30, 2022
- Effective DevOps Posted on January 5, 2022 All Book Reviews
Latest Posts
- Securing the WordPress Admin Dashboard Posted on February 15, 2014
- Reverse SSL Proxy with Nginx Posted on February 15, 2014
- Problems installing Chrome on OpenSuSE 13.1 Posted on January 6, 2014
- Password protecting single user mode Posted on December 28, 2013
- Password protecting GRUB in RHEL/CentOS Posted on December 22, 2013
February 15, 2014
Securing the WordPress Admin Dashboard
by Alpha01
So the primary reason why I wanted to add SSL support to www.rubyninja.org is because I want all my /wp-admin traffic to be served securely.
Configuring WordPress to force the login page and all wp-admin traffic to be served over SSL is simply just a matter of defining the FORCE_SSL_LOGIN and FORCE_SSL_ADMIN constants in wp-config.php.
define( 'FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true );
define( 'FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true );
wordpress February 15, 2014
Reverse SSL Proxy with Nginx
by Alpha01
Nginx is turning to be an awesome SSL reverse proxy server, although I can’t say I’ve really put it to real heavy duty use or how it well scale since my sites have relatively slow traffic. Thus said, a reverse SSL proxy using Nginx is working flawless in my environment!
Since all of my sites are being served within a KVM guest using NAT networking, all SSL traffic has to go through the KVM host of which Nginx is being used to proxy the requests to the guest KVM. Nginx is awesome since it supports specifying multiple server blocks (think of virtual hosts in Apache) set to listen on port 443 within the main http block. With this configuration available, it is possible to specify different reverse proxy end points.
On my server I have enabled SSL for www.rubysecurity.org and www.rubyninja.org.
First thing I needed to do is to map the sites local IPs to the KVM hosts file.
192.168.100.208 rubysecurity.org www.rubysecurity.org
192.168.100.209 rubyninja.org www.rubyninja.org
Then configure nginx.conf (sample server blocks):
server {
listen 443;
server_name www.rubysecurity.org;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/certs/www.rubysecurity.org.bundled.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/certs/www.rubysecurity.org.key;
location / {
proxy_pass https://www.rubysecurity.org;
### Set headers ####
proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
#proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;##
#This is better##
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
add_header Front-End-Https on;
# We expect the downsteam servers to redirect to the right hostname, so don't do any rewrites here.
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
server {
listen 443;
server_name www.rubyninja.org;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/certs/www.rubyninja.org.bundled.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/certs/www.rubyninja.org.key;
location / {
proxy_pass https://www.rubyninja.org;
### Set headers ####
proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
#proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;##
#This is better##
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
#add_header Front-End-Https on;
# We expect the downsteam servers to redirect to the right hostname, so don't do any rewrites here.
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
One interesting thing in Nginx with SSL is that it doesn’t have a dedicated Certificate Authority (CA) ssl certificate directive, unlike SSLCACertificateFile in Apache. Instead the CA certificate has to be bundled with the public ssl certificate, which it’s really not a big deal given that multiple CA’s tend to bundle their intermediate CA certificates similarly.
security nginx January 6, 2014
Problems installing Chrome on OpenSuSE 13.1
by Alpha01
Error
linux-5n99:/home/tony/Downloads # rpm -ivh google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
warning: google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 7fac5991: NOKEY
error: Failed dependencies:
lsb >= 4.0 is needed by google-chrome-stable-31.0.1650.63-1.x86_64
Fix
linux-5n99:/home/tony/Downloads # yast --install lsb
opensuse December 28, 2013
Password protecting single user mode
by Alpha01
I was surprise to find out how easy it was to password protect runlevel 1 aka single user mode in RHEL/CentOS.
Simply update the SINGLE variable in the file /etc/sysconfig/init
SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin
If the root password cannot be retrieved/reset, then at this point the only option will be to boot into a rescue environment, assuming encryption hasn’t been enabled.
Tags: [centos security December 22, 2013
Password protecting GRUB in RHEL/CentOS
by Alpha01
Specifying a password to modify GRUB during the boot start-up phase can be initially set during the install, but it can also be manually added and or modified after the installation.
Using the grub-md5-crypt utility, you can generate an md5 hashed password (some security better than no security).
[root@centos6 ~]# grub-md5-crypt
Password:
Retype password:
$1$/dvPV1$ngGsOO21eHj2lzEk7wg9d0
Now, is just a matter of adding the following entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf.
password --md5 $1$/dvPV1$ngGsOO21eHj2lzEk7wg9d0
Restart, and voala.
centos rhel security