IPTABLES - Opening server ports to specific IP addresses

I have been doing some housekeeping on my VPS, and decided there's a few ports that should only be accessed by certain IP addresses for security purposes.

My VPS uses Linux, so I had to find a way to somehow changing my iptables settings to block the specific ports to every IP address, except for the ones I specified.

It's pretty straight forward, and here  how you can block a specific port to everyone except for some IP addresses (the instructions are for Centos 5.5, but should work for other distros without problems):

Open our iptables settings file:

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 6:20 PM - Categories: Linux | VPS

Speed up yor website - Part 2 - The Free CDN

To continue with our series of website optimization tricks, I'll talk a little bit more about Content Delivery Network (CDN), and will talk you though the steps of creating a totally free CDN for your website.

Basically, as I've already stated on my previous post, a CDN is an external network which specializes in serving static content. It normally consists of a few servers spread around the world, so the data will travel the shortest route to get to their destination based on Geolocation.

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 2:20 PM - Categories: Website Optimization | General Techie Stuff | VPS | Technology

Speed up yor website - Part 1

Assets such as stylesheets, images and videos are often the major hit taken by a webserver when a webpage is loaded. I'm often trying to improve my page loads by using published pages (flat html) and rewrites, so I don't need to run a dynamic page when it's not necessary.

Publishing usually brings a great deal of improvement, and browser cache often helps a lot too, but sometimes you just need to load assets on every single page load, and if you have lots of new users every day, browser cache will usually do very little, as this new users will need to hit the webserver and get the images for the first time in order to have it cached.

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 2:20 PM - Categories: Website Optimization | General Techie Stuff | VPS | Technology

Creating new ColdFusion 8 instances - The easy way - Appendix

Following Andy Allan's comment on my previous post, I decided to write a new post and make some things clear here.

In fact, I didn't realize that creating the new instance as a Windows Service through ColdFusion Administrator would cause so much trouble as it does. Basically, if you do check "Create Windows Service", your new instnace will automatically be created as a Windows Service. It's not too bad, as you would normally want your new ColdFusion instance to start-up with your server.

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 10:48 PM - Categories: ColdFusion | Adobe | VPS | CFML - 101

Apache 101 - Are you rotating your logs?

It came to my attention today that my website was serving blank pages, and I got really intrigued with it. I checked the memory, and everything was fine, and my logs wouldn't indicate any obvious error. I did a quick research, and some people were saying this happens due to your log files being full which cause your OS's open file to go nuts, and you run out of file slots. 

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 3:00 PM - Categories: VPS

CFML 101 - Protecting Railo admin folder

I have seen people asking this question more than two times now, so I decided it's about time I write a blog post about it. In ColdFusion it was really easy to solve this problem, as CFIDE is a physical folder, so you could simply move it away from the webroot, and it wouldn't be accessible to the entire world.

On Railo it's a bit trickier, as the admin and server folders are virtual directories, hence you can't simply "move it away". Obviously it's password protected, so people won't simply have access to it and screw up with your configuration, but a more will powered person could easily brute force into it.

I have to reinforce here that a really will powered lad would probably break into anything, or even log into your server and make it a real mess. It's always good to have this false security sensation though, so I'll post here how I do my own security.

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 10:41 PM - Categories: Railo | Linux | VPS | CFML - 101

Apache 101 - Avoiding duplicate content on your domain.

Did you know that search engines consider things like /index.cfm and  http://placona.co.uk/index.cfm as duplicate content? It might sound like a wise thing to do, as your site would be accessible by whichever URL related to your domain. I'll say here it's not, as search engines like Google consider this an offense and will penalize you should they think you're doing it on purpose.

Google normally are very strict and harsh with people trying to "play" with their search engine, or people who try to black hat SEO. And content duplication might be just what will put your domain on the bottom of their search.

I then thought about a very slick way of getting rid of content duplication. You can simply create a rule on your .htaccess (or httpd.conf as that's what I use), and will will take care of redirecting any request to non-www to a www version of your website.

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  comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 10:21 AM - Categories: VPS