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THE Ultimate Htaccess

htaccess file .htaccess is a very ancient configuration file for web servers, and is one of the most powerful configuration files most webmasters will ever come across. This htaccess guide shows off the very best of the best htaccess tricks and code snippets from hackers and server administrators.

You've come to the right place if you are looking to acquire mad skills for using .htaccess files!

Apache, Hosting, Htaccess, Optimization, Security, SEO, Web Development, WordPress

Awk Tutorial and Introduction

While researching a unix/linux tool awk I came upon one of the most thorough and helpful tutorials I've ever seen devoted to a particular topic. It's old-school just the way I like it. I contacted the author, Bruce Barnett because I just HAD to have this article for my readers, who are predominantly running solaris/unix/bsd/linux and he kindly gave permission.

Linux

HOWTO: Uninstall CPANEL over SSH

The following is just a quick but detailed reference of some of the commands I used to successfully uninstall cpanel permanently. This is for advanced users of the shell. If you run a single one of these commands without fully understanding it, you will probably kill your server, lose everything on it permanently, not have a website or email for weeks.. So backup everything. FIRST. You should also contact your hosting provider support - but be prepared for some MAJOR negativity.. cpanel makes things very easy for web-hosting companies, and you are less than a drop in their bucket.

Hacking

Crazy POWERFUL Bash Prompt

bash power prompt PS1This amazing bash linux prompt does more than meets the eye. If you want to know how to become really good with technology, linux is the secret sauce behind the AskApache articles. Open Source is elixir of the web. Thanks to everyone who helped me for the past 20 years. I use linux/bsd because homey don't play, so this is geared to be as productive a prompt as I can make it.

Don't have much time.. or just don't care? Not a problem, here are the 3 lines to copy and paste - you can just paste them right in your shell to test it, or add to a startup script.

export AA_P="export PVE=\"\\033[m\\033[38;5;2m\"\$(( \`sed -n \"s/MemFree:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\` / 1024 ))\"\\033[38;5;22m/\"\$((\`sed -n \"s/MemTotal:[\\t ]\\+\\([0-9]\\+\\) kB/\\1/p\" /proc/meminfo\`/ 1024 ))MB\"\\t\\033[m\\033[38;5;55m\$(< /proc/loadavg)\\033[m\";echo -en \"\""
export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;((\$SECONDS % 10==0 ))&&eval \"\$AA_P\";echo -en \"\$PVE\";"
export PS1="\\[\\e[m\\n\\e[1;30m\\][\$\$:\$PPID \\j:\\!\\[\\e[1;30m\\]]\\[\\e[0;36m\\] \\T \\d \\[\\e[1;30m\\][\\[\\e[1;34m\\]\\u@\\H\\[\\e[1;30m\\]:\\[\\e[0;37m\\]\${SSH_TTY} \\[\\e[0;32m\\]+\${SHLVL}\\[\\e[1;30m\\]] \\[\\e[1;37m\\]\\w\\[\\e[0;37m\\] \\n(\$SHLVL:\\!)\\\$ " && eval $AA_P

Linux

PHP and AJAX shell console

Ever wanted to execute commands on your server through php? Now you can. I'm calling this file (see below) shell.php and it allows you to run commands on your web server with the same permissions that your php executable has.

Hacking

Chmod, Umask, Stat, Fileperms, and File Permissions

Unix file permissions are one of the more difficult subjects to grasp.. Well, ok maybe "grasp" isn't the word.. Master is the right word.. Unix file permissions is a hard topic to fully master, mainly I think because there aren't many instances when a computer user encounters them seriously, and bitwise is oldschool. This contains a listing of all possible permission masks and bits from a linux, php, and web hosting view.... cuz you guys AskApache Regs Rock!

Security

Optimized Vimrc with 256 Colorscheme

askapachecode 256color colorscheme and vimrc screenshotThis is not your everyday vimrc. This is my personalized vimrc.. works especially great on remote servers, in tmux, screen, etc.

This doesn't require a git checkout, a vim update, a bash update, an OS update, a plugin. No. 1 vimrc, 1 colorscheme, just use curl to download and it's on. I use this on Arch Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, Cent OS, Red Hat, and that's mostly it so far.
If you aren't already using vim as your primary editor in a powerful way, you are gonna owe me for this.

Linux

TMUX

penguin-tmuxarchlinux-on-macStop wasting your lives with Mac Terminals.. or Macs. Get a real machine and then get a real shell multiplexer! For many years we all loved GNU Screen, but tmux is by far a better option today. The only time I am in the shell and not using a multiplexer, is when I'm not on one of my machines. My Arch Linux machines all run URxvt and my .bash_profiles all start tmux automataically, whether in X or single-user mode, tmux is where it's at.

Hacking, Linux

Debugging Tools for Windows

I am almost ready to publish the final tutorial on using ssh tunnels from a truecrypt partition on a Windows machine. Of course I choose to go way overboard in my research and the tutorial is full of some pretty awesome windows tricks.. I will come back to this post soon and post all the other advanced tools I use for debugging windows, for now though you MUST know how to debug the kernel and use these basic debugging tools.

Windows

Internet Census 2012 – Port scanning using insecure embedded devices – Carna Botnet

While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

Hacking

30x Faster Cache and Site Speed with TMPFS

NOT a typo.. 30x is measurable, well-documented, and easily tested. This is what open-source is about. I haven’t had time to post much the past year, I'm always working! So I wanted to make up for that by publishing an article on a topic that would blow your mind and be something that you could actually start using and really get some benefit out of it. This is one of those articles that the majority of web hosting companies would love to see in paperback, so they could burn it.

Optimization

Optimizing Servers and Processes for Speed with ionice, nice, ulimit

To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.

Optimization

Password Protection Plugin Status

Enumerating Permissions can be Annoying

Don’t ask me how because I won’t tell you, but on one of the hosts I was testing on that did not allow direct access I was able to get the Apache server running as dhapache to erroneously write a file into my users blog directory. This is a big security no-no and I now have my .htaccess file written into the blog directory where it should go, but instead of my php script’s user having write access to the file so I can modify it, its owned by dhapache! Because the file is owned by dhapache I shouldn’t even be allowed to know it exists, but there it is. So the next step was to try and take ownership of the .htaccess file so that I could modify it. I tried and tried but was unsuccessful, I couldn’t modify it so that was another dead end. Actually it took me awhile to figure out how to remove the file from my directory. Being that it was owned by dhapache I couldn’t delete or modify it using my php process or even through ftp/ssh! Sysadmins regularly run find commands that search the servers for any files owned by dhapache that should not be there as this is a big red flag that someone has found a way to manipulate dhapache which could potentially lead to modifying dhapache-owned server config files, which sometimes is all it takes to hack your website and server.. Luckily I was able to delete it by basically running the hack again to overwrite the file.

WordPress

Caching WordPress with Batcache and Memcache

join-meUsing memcache for me personally and the client sites I work on, has improved performance by over 1000%, in some cases even higher than that. It is a truly revolutionary way to optimize the performance of MySQL queries, remote requests such as to twitter or other apis, and this article is step 1. Plan is to go all the way to step 10 in future articles, it it grossly underused and misused in the WP world.

Optimization, WordPress

SEO Redirects without mod_rewrite

Web Professionals use mod_rewrite to issue 301 and 302 Redirects for Search Engines. Sometimes you may not have mod_rewrite.c or you want an alternative redirect method. Using mod_alias RedirectMatch you can use REGEX in Redirect commands!

Htaccess

Install multiple OS Without Cds

Orig published 2006. I had a CD-RW drive but being a computer security researcher I had no money for blank cd-recordables. What follows is how I managed to install various operating systems on my computer (1 hard drive) without having to burn to a CD the ISO and then boot from that.

And also:

==Phrack Inc.==
 
              Volume 0x0b, Issue 0x3f, Phile #0x0a of 0x14
 
|=-----------------=[ Hacking Grub for fun and profit ]=-----------------=|

Linux

Fix Linux Users Home Permissions with a Cron Job

As a security nut myself, and also a Linux admin, one of my biggest pet peeves is when I've taken the time and care to segment all the users on a server into separate home directories, and then some developer comes along, logs in as root, and changes the ownership of files. Other things can cause this, like Apache, PHP, Mutt, etc.. So I've always used a cron job that executes daily (and on demand) which automatically fixes all the permissions back to what they should be.

Linux

COMPUTER SECURITY TOOLBOX

List of mainly obscure security software geared more for the master pentester. These are mostly for unix, bsd, and mac and many are difficult to install and setup (require custom servers, inside access points, obscure libraries). Only programs that output data are included, so no actual exploits or anything. Most of these output extremely useful albeit extremely technical information.

Security

Caching Tutorial for Webmasters

If you examine the preferences dialog of any modern Web browser (like Internet Explorer, Safari or Mozilla), you'll probably notice a 'cache' setting. This lets you set aside a section of your computer's hard disk to store representations that you've seen, just for you. The browser cache works according to fairly simple rules. It will check to make sure that the representations are fresh, usually once a session (that is, the once in the current invocation of the browser).

Optimization

Custom Boot Menu in Windows XP

Advanced XP Boot MenuOne of the first things that I do upon receiving a new Windows computer is immediately create a poweruser-style customized boot menu. Then every time I boot I can choose Safe Mode, Recovery Console, Debug, whatever I want! It's quick and easy to set-up and everyone should have one, soo sweet!

Windows

Racing the Windows XP ACL demon

Both of these pcs were behind a hardware/software firewall, and so each had their own host names, we'll say PEPSI and COKE, and they were both on a private network on the same subnet, so each belonged to a domain called MARKETING.

Hacking

Elite Log File Scrolling with Color Syntax

Scrolls the latest log entries for multiple log files to the current screen or to any other monitor or TTY in color using syntax highlighting, making debugging easier and saving a lot of time for multi-monitor workstations.

Linux

Actual Htaccess Files from My Server

#### No https except to wp-admin -
# If the request is empty ( implies fopen or normal file access by a php script )
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^$ [OR]

# OR if the request if for wp-admin or wp-login.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(wp-admin|wp-login.php).*$ [NC,OR]

# OR if the Referer is https
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https://www.askapache.com/.*$ [NC]

# THEN skip the following rule, basically all this does is force https or badhost to be redirected
# BUT because of the above 3 rewritecond's, this won't break poorly written admin scripts
RewriteRule .* - [S=1]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.askapache.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* https://www.askapache.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /(wp-admin/.*|wp-login.php.*) HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule .* https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Htaccess

Mirroring an Entire Site using Rsync over SSH

Sometimes there is an urgent need for creating an exact duplicate or "mirror" of a web site on a separate server. This could be needed for creating Round Robin Setups, Load-Balancing, Failovers, or for just plain vanilla backups. In the past I have used a lot of different methods to copy data from one server to another, including creating an archive of the whole directory and then using scp to send the file over, creating an archive and then encrypting it and then sending that file over using ftp, curl, etc., and my persistence at learning new ways to do things has paid off because now I use rsync to keep an exact replica of the entire directory on an external server, without having to use all the CPU and resources of other mirroring methods.

Security

Mod_Security .htaccess tricks

Mod_Security rivals Mod_Rewrite in the amount of features it provides. I decided to go ahead and post what I learned about it today, even though its tough to give away such awesome htaccess and apache tricks.. Learn how to control spam once and for all, conditionally log/deny/allow/redirect requests based on IP, username, etc.. Mod_Security is so fine!

Htaccess

Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers

askapache favorite addonsAdvanced Web Development by AskApache is a Firefox Collection I created since I'm always trying new Addons out and using multiple computers and I wanted a quick and easy way to install my favorite's and keep a running list. Firebug, YSlow, LastPass, and Web Developer are the only ones I always use regularly.

I like the idea of the last.fm but it's not as powerful as the site, which is awesome. Lately listening to Kings of Leon Radio...

Software