Prevent Denial Of Service attacks with mod_evasive

With today’s widespread use of cloud computing due to low cost and ease of use, the entry level hacker has found an easy playground to pray on the unexperienced and unprotected. It’s just amazing how many attack scripts are running against a new AWS EC2 instance as soon as it’s started. So what to do? How to protect against intruders and hackers and reliably prevent denial of service attacks?

While there are different kind of attacks, in this article we focus ...

Apache Prefork Vs Worker Threads

We often get questions like: What is the difference between Apache Prefork vs Worker Threads? Is it wrong to have set the configuration values the same for both? Or is it wrong to have them different?

In this quick article I will shed some light between the two modules and assess what real world circumstances, a certain os and application would call for which solution.

It all goes back to the old NCSA server where Apache 1 grew up in a UNIX ...

How To Enable Apache Digest Authentication

Basic http authentication in Apache (mod_auith) has been available for a while, but one major downside still exists, which is the exchange of plain text user name and password information over a possibly unsecured network. That is where Apache Digest Authentication takes over and provides us with MD5 encrypted values, using the mod_digest Apache module.

Here are the steps to create a password file to store all account information, install the apache module mod_auth_digest and the necessary configuration parameters to enable security ...

Hot To Install Memcache PHP On Mac OS X

I recently installed the memcached daemon on my MacBook Pro, including the necessary PHP client for development purposes. I just prefer to work locally instead of using a VM running Linux. And the process is actually quite simple and straight forward. Please note, I have included both clients, the old standard one and the newer PECL extension, because I deal with different applications and also lots of people seems to get confused when they install one version and their memcache ...

How to install PHP Mcrypt to Snow Leopard

The following instructions on how to install php mcrypt to Snow Leopard assume that you have a working Apache 2.2 / PHP 5.3 in place and want to add the php mcrypt module. It will work as a fresh install, but keep in mind that additional configuration steps after these instructions are necessary to get your web server working properly. Those additional steps are omitted here, as there are countless resources available on the Internet.

1. If you don’t already have the mcrypt ...

How to install Apache PHP and MySQL on a Mac

The following instructions guide you thru the installation of the latest LAMP Stack (Apache, PHP and MySQL) on MacOS X Snow Leopard.

Sure, there are pre-packaged solutions like MAMP and MAMP Pro, but if you want to know the inner workings of a LAMP stack, you want to do the installation and configuration yourself.

Let’s get started. Here are the steps to install Apache, MySQL and PHP on a Mac OS X

Nginx and memcached module

Memcache is traditionally used as a module inside server side scripts, such as PHP, ASP, ColdFusion and others. And it’s doing a terrific job, as long as it’s implemented correctly.

But if we look under the hood of the actual Memcache application, and I’m not talking about the PHP or ASP extension, but rather the executable that’s running as a daemon under Linux, it is a rather simple, database like application running in memory. Now there are two basic actions that ...