Archive: security

So there is often a requirement for sharing files but what happens if those files are files that absolutely must be secure, like private ssh keys? Well Dropbox whilst a good product is third-party and not encrypted so if there’s an exploit, the contents of the files could well be exposed to people you don’t [...]

There’s a little-known trick to using the plesk admin user password to access the mysql database that works on many a plesk machine. Effectively the plesk admin password is stored in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow – in plain text. This means that the following commands for instance work very well as root : mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` mytop [...]

The hosts file is a highly useful little text file that most people are not really aware of. Basically what it does is set a specific url to an IP address that you specify. This is great for testing web server etc. Also, we can block unwanted content by changing the IP address for the [...]