Technical - Spheron1

January 18, 2014

Tags used by OWASP CRS ModSecurity rules

I couldn’t find a definitive list of the tags used by the OWASP CRS ModSecurity rules, so after a bit of faffing around, here’s what I’ve come up with for the “base” rules in OWASP CRS version 2.2.9 (current at the time of writing). I’ve tried to group them together as best I can: Web Attack: OWASP_CRS/WEB_ATTACK/XSS OWASP_CRS/WEB_ATTACK/DIR_TRAVERSAL OWASP_CRS/WEB_ATTACK/RFI OWASP_CRS/WEB_ATTACK/COMMAND_INJECTION...

ModSecurity Comments: 0

January 11, 2014

XenConvert fails to import OVF to XenServer

I recently ran into a problem when trying to P2V a server with the Citrix XenConvert tool. XenConvert would successfully create the local VHD file for the disk image as well as the OVF file for the server and then copy them to XenServer, however at the vert last hurdle (actually importing the OVF into XenCenter), it would then fail...

Citrix XenServer Comments: 0

January 2, 2014

OpenVZ reboot loop

I recently encountered a strange reboot loop with a server running OpenVZ. When booting the server, the host would come up and start the process of booting the containers, then at some point during the boot process it would reboot without any errors. I managed to break the reboot loop by quickly SSHing in to the host node whilst it...

OpenVZ Comments: 0

January 2, 2014

cPanel breaking Dovecot in 11.40

Recently I’ve had a couple of cases where cPanel randomly breaks Dovecot with one of the cPanel 11.40.x updates. In one of these cases, cPanel actually uninstalled the Dovecot RPM as part of the automated, overnight upcp process! In the other cases, Dovecot was still running and accepting connections, but POP3/IMAP clients were getting messages that their passwords were wrong....

cPanel/WHM

December 29, 2013

SolusVM displaying wrong disk usage statistics for Xen PV VMs

Recently some of our Xen PV VMs started to show strange disk space usage statistics in SolusVM – despite there being plenty of space left on the disk in the VM, SolusVM was reporting that the disk was nearly full! I struggled to find any public information about this, but apparently it is a known problem with SolusVM and the...

SolusVM Comments: 0

December 15, 2013

SuperMicro ipmicfg utility on Linux

SuperMicro have a nice little utility called ipmicfg, which can be used to interact with the IPMI BMC from within your operating system. This can do all sorts of things with the IPMI BMC, however it’s really useful if you want to change the IP address details on the IPMI card without rebooting your system and going into the BIOS...

IPMI/Linux/Red Hat and CentOS/SuperMicro

September 13, 2013

ImageMagick and PHP 5.4

When building the PHP imagick module for ImageMagick on a server running PHP 5.4 (a cPanel/WHM box in this case), you receive the following error: /root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c: In function ‘zim_imagick_setfont’: /root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: ‘struct _php_core_globals’ has no member named ‘safe_mode’ /root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: ‘CHECKUID_CHECK_FILE_AND_DIR’ undeclared (first use in this function) /root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once /root/tmp/pear/imagick/imagick_class.c:1442: error: for each...

cPanel/WHM/PHP Comments: 0

September 11, 2013

Dell DSET on CentOS

Those of you unfortunate enough to have encountered the Dell technical suport department will know their love for the Dell diagnostic tools. Those of you who run CentOS and have been asked for a DSET report (Dell System E-Support Tool) will also know that the DSET tool refuses to run on an “unsupported” operating system. Luckily, DSET is quite easy...

Dell PowerEdge Comments: 0

September 8, 2013

Citrix XenServer boot from CD/DVD

If you’re using Paravirtualised (PV) guest Virtual Machines on Citrix XenServer, then it’s not immediately obvious how to boot the guest from a CD/DVD should you need to. In the “Boot Options” tab of the Properties for the Virtual Machine, the “Boot Device” drop down menu will be greyed out, with no obvious way of enabling it. The actual method...

Citrix XenServer Comments: 0

August 4, 2013

Bulk delete etc. failing in Zimbra 8

Shortly after upgrading to Zimbra 8, I ran into annoying behavior when trying to delete large numbers of messages, both via IMAP and the web interface. If deleting the messages one-by-one (even in quick succession), then everything was fine, but if I selected several messages and deleted them all at once then it would fail with a “UID COPY failed”...

Zimbra Comments: 0

Category: Technical