I discovered these tips and tricks mostly while working as a network security penetration specialist hired to find security holes in web hosting environments. That is when I started examining htaccess files in great detail and learned about the incredible untapped power of htaccess. The only avenue on shared-hosting was and is the .htaccess file, and holy freaking fiber-optics.. it's almost as powerful as httpd.conf itself

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This is a big update from the last time I looked into this, when I enumerated 57 Status Codes that Apache 2.x was capable of handling. This list contains 83 Status Codes recognized by Apache. I compiled the latest 2.4.4 Apache in order to view the actual codes sent by a live server.. very cool. You can read about the newest HTTP Status Codes in RFC 6585.

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Request to http://www.askapache.com/cg/rewrite-test/?catch=caught&this=that

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} = GET /cgi-bin/php/pro/rewrite-test/?catch=caught&this=that HTTP/1.1
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} = /cg/rewrite-test/?catch=caught&this=that
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} = catch=caught&this=that
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} = www.askapache.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} = 8.8.8.8

The post RewriteCond Cheatsheet appeared first on AskApache.

The following is a transcript of a chat I had with a company called tektonic, and at that time I was looking for a cheap linux host to use for some redundancy/failover operations. I generally contact a new hosting company like this every few months.. I like to have options available in case of some kind of failure or network attack, so it's always a good idea to have a few ace linux servers in your back pocket.

If you've read any other articles on AskApache, you can see a certain obsession towards optimization, speed, and security -- so that is the purpose of the following questions.

The post Questions I Ask Web Hosting Companies, Before Buying appeared first on AskApache.

The story behind this plugin is sorta wack, but in a good way :). While doing tons of security research on permissions, authorization, access, etc.. for the Password Protection plugin (still being worked on), I needed to have unheard of debugging capabilities while working on the plugin on the various websites, webhosts, and test servers that I use to test in different environments. So I hacked together a bunch of php code that helped me debug, actually I pretty much went overkill and tried to get as much debugging info as programmatically possible, and it ended up being so much code that I took it out of my Password Protection code and made it its own plugin.

The post AskApache Debug Viewer Plugin for WordPress appeared first on AskApache.

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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.

The post HOWTO: Uninstall CPANEL over SSH appeared first on AskApache.

This 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.

The post Optimized Vimrc with 256 Colorscheme appeared first on AskApache.

We've figured out what mod_rewrite variables look like, a cheatsheet of the actual value.

The post Mod_Rewrite Variables Cheatsheet appeared first on AskApache.

Quick and easy method to get a list of all Apache Modules currently loaded, a list of all the directives each module provides, a list of currently used directives, etc... These directives can be used in httpd.conf and/or .htaccess files so it is definately useful to know which ones are available and which ones are currently being used.

The post Mod_Status tricks to View Apache Module Directives appeared first on AskApache.