Soumplis' Personal Web Site

After a long time watching closely the evolution of Spacewalk (you know, the open source Redhat Satellite server), I decided to move on to its version 1.0. I have a working installation with more than 40 clients since version 0.2 and I followed all upgrades until version 0.8. At some time there I decided to wait for version 1.0 to move to a new server with adequate resources to handle the load. I must admit that I had a secret hope of not installing Oracle again. I proceeded to the ...

In the world of security everybody admits that the question is not "if a security breach will happen, but when". This weekend was my turn. I do my best to keep up to date my blog and generally I try to keep bad guys out of my place. However a nasty Javascript XSS (cross-site) attack hit me on Friday evening. I noticed that something could be wrong with my blog when my antivirus software initiated alarms every time I opened my browser (where suprisingly, I have my web site as homepage :-)). ...

Today I decided to update my Spacewalk server to the latest version (0.8 on today's nightly build). In case you have never heard of Spacewalk before, "Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It is the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived". Personally I use it as a central update server for all my CentOS server (more than 40 systems at the moment). I follow spacewalk since version 0.2, so one can easy understand ...

Well it happened to me today a strong fight against a spammer on one of my servers. I had a very hard time tracking down the originator of the spam as it was a shared hosting server and the spammer had gained, among others, ftp access to the exploited account. Thus it was easy to hide the spam sending code within a legitimate and ordinary looking php script which implemented its own SMTP engine. This way there where no logs on my Exim SMTP server log files and I had to examine Apache log files ...