Strange domains in mod_pagespeed cache folder - apache

About a year ago I have installed mod_pagespeed on my VPS server, set it up and left it running. Recently I was exploring files on my server, went to pagespeed cache folder and discovered some strange folders.
All folders usually named this way ,2Fwww.mydomain.com or ,2F111.111.111.111 for IP addresses. I was surprised to see some domains that does not belong to me, like:
24x7-allrequestsallowed.com
allrequestsallowed.com
m.odnoklassniki.ru
www.fbi.gov
www.securitylab.ru
It looks like something dodgy is going on, was my server compromised, is there any reasonable explanation?

That does look peculiar. Everything in the cache folder should be files that mod_pagespeed tried to rewrite. There are two ways that I know of that this can happen:
1) You reference some third-party resource (say an image from another domain, or google analytics script) and you have explicitly enabled rewriting of that domain with ModPagespeedDomain www.example.com or ModPagespeedDomain *.
2) If your server accepts HTTP requests with invalid Host headers. Try (for example) wget --header="Host: www.fbi.gov" www.yourdomain.com/foo/bar.html. If your server accepts requests like that it may be providing mod_pagespeed with an incorrect base domain, and then subresources would be fetched from the same domain (so if www.yourdomain.com/foo/bar.html references some.jpeg, and your server accepts invalid host headers, we could fetch www.fbi.gov/foo/some.jpeg as the resource). There was a recent security release that makes sure all of these subrequests are done against localhost (not arbitrary third-party websites). Please see: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/CVE-2012-4001
You might want to look through these folders and see what specific resources are in there. I think that the biggest concern you should have is that someone might be trying to perform an XSS attack on your users or maybe a DDoS attack against another website (like www.fbi.gov), using your server as one vector. I do not think that these folders are indicative that your server itself is compromised.
If you would like to discuss this more, https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mod-pagespeed-discuss is a good list to join and email.

Related

Domain URL masking

I am currently hosting the contents of a site with ProviderA. I have a domain registered with ProviderB. I want users to access the contents (www.providerA.com/sub/content) by visiting www.providerB.com. A domain forward is easy enough and works as intended, however, unless I embed the site in a frame (which is a big no-no), the actual URL reads www.providerA.com/sub/content despite the user inputting www.providerB.com.
I really need a solution for this. A domain masking without the use of a frame. I'm sure this has been done before. An .htaccess domain rewrite?
Your help would be hugely appreciated! I'm going nuts trying to find a solution.
For Apache
Usual way: setup mod_proxy. The apache on providerB becomes a client to providerA's apache. It gets the content and sends it back to the client.
But looks like you only have .htaccess. So no proxy, you need full configuration access for that.
So you cannot, see: How to set up proxy in .htaccess
If you have PHP on providerB
Setup a proxy written in PHP. All requests to providerB are intercepted by that PHP proxy. It gets the content from providerA and sends it back. So it does the same thing as the Apache module. However, depending on the quality of the implementation, it might fail on some requests, types, sizes, timeouts, ...
Search for "php proxy" on the web, you will see a couple available on GitHub and others. YMMV as to how difficult it is to setup, and the reliability.
No PHP but some other server side language
Obviously that could be done in another language, I checked PHP because that is what I use the most.
The best solution would be to transfer the content to providerB :-)

List of served files in apache

I am doing some reverse engineering on a website.
We are using LAMP stack under CENTOS 5, without any commercial/open source framework (symfony, laravel, etc). Just plain PHP with an in-house framework.
I wonder if there is any way to know which files in the server have been used to produce a request.
For example, let's say I am requesting http://myserver.com/index.php.
Let's assume that 'index.php' calls other PHP scripts (e.g. to connect to the database and retrieve some info), it also includes a couple of other html files, etc
How can I get the list of those accessed files?
I already tried to enable the server-status directive in apache, and although it is working I can't get what I want (I also passed the 'refresh' parameter)
I also used lsof -c httpd, as suggested in other forums, but it is producing a very big output and I can't find what I'm looking for.
I also read the apache logs, but I am only getting the requests that the server handled.
Some other users suggested to add the PHP directives like 'self', but that means I need to know which files I need to modify to include that directive beforehand (which I don't) and which is precisely what I am trying to find out.
Is that actually possible to trace the internal activity of the server and get those file names and locations?
Regards.
Not that I tried this, but it looks like mod_log_config is the answer to my own question

Domain names for production / development server best practice

Ok so I have a number of CMSs and eCommerce applications, that require the correct URL (otherwise the links will not work). Of course in my development server, the domain name cannot be the same as the production server... do you guys just do an edit/replace on all files and edit the mysql entries before pushing the development to production server environment? Or is there a better way to do this?
You could just place everything in a directory with a random hex or other valid characters as the name like:
yourdomain.com/XHTEDD12222-112KJK
You might also want to include an entry in your robots.txt file to exclude this directory. This isn't 100% safe, and it is best to use a local server or access the site via IPv6. IPv6 is suggested over IPv4 for security with crawlers. Anything you put up publicly isn't exactly safe.
Once you change the name with one of the above options, you could just refactor your project with the name change. If you go with IP and or local server, you can refactor to that number and it should still work.
You may also look into editing host files to achieve a similar workaround without redirecting DNS servers to point at your development server, but this is OS dependent. Comment your OS and I might be able to help with that.
Lastly, for security, you could include a PHP wrapper for all of your pages that look for a specific IP address in $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] global variable, but this could get really complicated to implement and I'm unaware of any currently available components that do this.

Can a website be cached anywhere other than a browser's cache?

My client is seeing a different version of the website on his computers then what I am seeing on mine. He claims to be deleting the cache. I'm using Safari with the cache disabled via the Develop menu and I see the correct version of the site.
Is it possible that the website is somehow cached by my client's ISP or something along those lines?
Update:
I think I need to describe the problem better:
My client has a web hosting package where he has his domains and email accounts. somedomain.com has it's A record changed to point to Behance's ProSite hosted service.
The problem is that when he goes to somedomain.com he gets the index.html that's sitting in his web server's public_html directory, and not his ProSite. Using the same domain I see the ProSite. He has cleared his cache and tried on a computer at home with the same result. This is what lead me to believe that there is some sort of caching issue somewhere along the line with his ISP(s).
Is there anything I can do about this?
Proxy servers at the ISP or even the client's site might do this. Or even network-compressors in some (mal)configurations.
Depending on the site you might also be seeing actually a different site. e.g. Google redirects to different servers using DNS load balancing.
Yes, you're right. To improve performance and the speed in loading page from the same request modern browser seem to great at caching. I myself have the same problem as well. To resolve this problem You should tag version of your projects whenever you deploy them to production.
Based on the update, the problem was with DNS cache.
DNS can be cached at the following levels:
browser
operation system
router
DNS provider
And each of them has its own way to flush DNS cache. Except DNS provider where the only thing you can is to wait for cache invalidation. Though you can replace your current DNS provider with another one who won't have your domain in his cache. You have all the chances to find such if your domain isn't popular.

How to hide distributed servers under a single domain?

I currently host my company's website and blog on separate servers, reached by separate domain names - www.example.com and www.example.net. This is so I can give blog server access to our partners without compromising security on our main server. However, our SEO guy is now demanding that the blog be put on our main server, as www.example.com/blog.
I would like to maintain the current server separation rather than putting both on the same server. Is there any good way to keep them separated, but have them both under a single domain name? A subdomain would also be acceptable (blog.example.com).
My main website server is a Debian box running Apache 2, and I have full root access to it. The blog server is run by Hostgator, and I have limited access.
Edit: Thanks, all. In this particular situation I don't particularly want to transfer the blog again, and I don't have easy access to the DNS records, so i went with mod_proxy and it worked like a charm. I wish I could give you all "preferred answer" status, though, because all of your information was awesome.
A subdomain would be easy: just create an A record in DNS which maps blog.example.com to the IP address of the blog server, and have another A record in DNS which maps www.example.com to the main website server (this latter record probably already exists).
Would the SEO guy be happy with blog.example.com? It's not the same from an SEO perspective, but it might be good enough for him. I work at a company where SEO is at least 1/3 of what we do, and that's our setup: blog.example.com and www.example.com.
You could try to get fancy and proxy requests to /blog to the 2nd server, if you insist on keeping the blog off your box, but I think you can find a secure way to share space. Proxying like that could get annoying, and it basically doubles the latency to your blog.
Give the blog guys an account on your box; don't give them root/special privileges. If you can get away with it, don't even give them SSH access -- just give them a FTP login (make sure they can't access /var/www), and maybe a mysql account or something. (As you can see, this all depends on how much control/power the blog folks demand.)
Then, just make a symlink to the blog root, so they can write to a restricted area like /home/blog/www and still have it included in the website:
ln -s ~blog/www /var/www/blog
If a subdomain is for some reason not a possible way for you to go, you could use Apache's mod_proxy module to proxy requests to /blog to your second server.