Henry Petry

Camping in Black Mountain

henry — Thu, 02 May 2013 02:41:21 +0000

A few photos from our recent weekend camping trip to Black Mountain, North Carolina. ...read more

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Log Failed WordPress Login Attempts

henry — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 19:50:13 +0000

This blog is powered by WordPress. I’m the only one who writes articles and therefore the only one authorized to login to the WordPress backend. It’s common knowledge that the default WordPress backend is located at http://www.blogname.com/wp-admin/. So I became curious if anyone else was trying to login to my WordPress account. I decided to ...read more

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Jailing Failed phpMyAdmin Attempts with Fail2Ban

henry — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:37:44 +0000

After consolidating all of my websites onto a Linode VPS, I’ve had more time to devote to scanning my log files. After seeing various failed attempts at trying to locate phpMyAdmin on my system, I decided to implement a Fail2Ban jail to block the incoming IP address. If you are not familiar with Fail2Ban, see ...read more

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Moving to a Linode Virtual Server

henry — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:56:29 +0000

I finally took one whole weekend to consolidate all of my various websites off of different shared hosting and virtual private server sites. I had made a quick checklist of all of the features I wanted in one location. After lots of research I decided to go with Linode.com. Here are some of the key ...read more

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Installing Fail2Ban on Debian

henry — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 23:36:35 +0000

Servers are routinely exposed to a barrage of attempts to gain unauthorized access. Common targets include SSH, SMTP, HTTP authentication, and FTP services. Fail2Ban is a great tool to block automated attempts to compromise your system. First make sure your package repositories and installed programs are up-to-date: To install Fail2Ban on Debian and Ubuntu systems, ...read more

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Protecting Web Forms from XSS and CSRF Attacks

henry — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:39:22 +0000

Cross-site scripting (XSS) and Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) are two types of malicious web form exploits. Their effect may range from a nuisance to a significant security risk, depending on the sensitivity of the data handled by the vulnerable website. I like to protect my web forms with a hashed key or token. Securing a ...read more

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Code Clarity with Class Constants

henry — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:27:24 +0000

I enjoy refactoring legacy code, especially when I can add clarity to ambiguous business rules by using class constants. Consider the following line of code: Now we are left with only a handfull of ways to know the true meaning of ’1′ and ’100′: Hope the previous developer wrote detailed code comments Hope there is ...read more

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Incremental Counting Using MYSQL

henry — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:00:51 +0000

Recently I was asked to create a report which would find bad customers who are abusing our service. I mean really bad customers like the ones who continually bounce checks, use bad credit cards, etc. Now since everyone makes mistakes, we decided to give them at least three chances before we dropped them entirely from our client list. Finding bad customers who need be dropped is the easy part. We already have a table which contained customer notes. Whenever a customer does something 'really bad' we automatically disable their account and enter a note which contains the phrase 'Account Disabled'. ...read more

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