Linux Admin Zone

I was amazed to hear from my friend that one of their server got hacked and reason may be that their part-time admin set password of root user as ‘admin’. Wow!! can’t believe it! They dont have right to cry about security attacks as they themselves keep their door opens

I’ve suggested them some points as per described below for ensuring secure access to servers. They have 5-6 Linux servers. This is obviously may not be the best way and I’m as always appreciate if you can give your suggestion in comments. My approach is that from 6 servers, we will be able to login only in 2 servers from remote through key based access and from these 2 server, we can access remaining. Here’s what we did:

Here’s small bash script to backup important log files from a server to a backup server. You should customize it per your environment. I’ve deployed this script in some hosts and its working fine for me but I’m not making any guarantee that this will work for you as well.

Task: Two most imporant log files in any Redhat based distro is /var/log/secure and /var/log/messages. These are basic log files and there are more log files when your server perform additional roles such as a database server, web server, mail server etc. You can look log files of other installed softwares also and add them in this script to backup them. I have a separate backup server where I want to transfer my log files after compressing them. You can transfer them in some location in case you dont have a separate backup host or environment.

There are various wasys to do this, but this is what I implemented. It is working as expected as of now on my RHEL 5.x boxes. I’ll take my usecase here and describe things.

Plesk web hosting control panel is managing several hundred domains on one of RHEL box. Addition and removal of domains is very common. We need to sync all domain’s httpdocs directory to other webservers. Of course, a simple rsync can be setup for this but it’s much efficient that rsync should only run when there’s any change, ie addition/removal of a domain or file updation etc. What I mean to say, instead of letting rsync detect changes, its better that our script should detect changes and then run rsync. The obvious advantage is that network burden is reduced because rsync will only sync contents with our servers when there are changes.