Outsource Support Blog

Mass changes to DNS zones on a cpanel server

Posted on: August 31, 2015

Let’s say you have a DNS server change, and need to update the zone records on all your domains to use the new name server “NS” records.  Rather then going through each and every one of them in the WHM, you can run these 2 simple commands. cd /var/named;grep -lR ns.oldnameserver.com *.db >> fixfiles.txt for …

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Common DNS syntax errors

Posted on: August 27, 2015

These are 2 of the most common syntax errors I see in DNS records. Any entry with a fully qulified domain name needs a trailing period. Any TXT entry needs to have the value in double quotation marks ” “   For example on the fully qualified domain names, these are wrong: domain.com IN A …

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Your Internet Address has changed since the beginning of your Mail session

Posted on: August 26, 2015

In Horde on a plesk server, if you get this error message it means your ISP has you setup so that your IP address constantly changes.  To stop this error from happening, you need to disable the IP check in horde.   To do this, SSH to the server, then edit the following file in …

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How to stop customers from using custom php.ini files in cPanel

Posted on: August 19, 2015

When using SuPHP on a server, a customer can create their own custom php.ini file that will allow them to change the PHP settings.  Which may or may not be a good thing depending on what they do. You can stop them from doing this by disabling this feature.   To do this, SSH to …

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How to disable VirtFS on a cPanel server

Posted on: August 18, 2015

VirtFS allows a user SSH access, while securing him to his home directory.  It makes it impossible for the user to access any other users folders, as he is jailed to his own folders. This can cause a server to use up a lot of space however, so you may need to disable this.  Bellow …

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How to block wordpress logins and xmlrpc with no referer

Posted on: August 12, 2015

If you are getting flooded with wordpress login attempts by a suspected hacker, you can add the following rule to mod security in /usr/local/apache/conf/modsec2.user.conf This rule will block any access to wp-login.php that does not contain a referer #block wp-lgoin.php with no referer <Locationmatch “/wp-login.php”> SecRule REQUEST_METHOD “POST” “deny,status:401,id:5000130,chain,msg:’wp-login request blocked, no referer’” SecRule &HTTP_REFERER …

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Some common postfix commands

Posted on: August 11, 2015

Here are a few of my most used postfix commands for managing the mail queue.   Check how many emails are in the queue per domain (based on from address) postqueue -p | grep “Aug” | awk ‘{print $7}’ | sed ‘s/^.*@//’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n List all the email from …

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Mod_security and cPanel temp URL’s

Posted on: July 30, 2015

If you have a customer that is getting ModSecurity errors when accessing parts of their site using a temp URL like this: http://host.servername.com/~theirusername You may want to whitelist the rule that is blocking the page, however you can not just whitelist this on the users account itself.  You need to make sure the whitelist happens …

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How to check if iptables blocked your IP address, and how to remove a block if it did

Posted on: July 29, 2015

If you need to check if an IP address is blocked in iptables, use the following command iptables -L -n –line-numbers | grep $IPADDRESS Replace $IPADDRESS with the IP address you need to check   If you need to remove a block, you need to know 2 things. The chain name that the block is …

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linux: rm command gives Argument list too long error

Posted on: July 22, 2015

If you have a folder that has a huge amount of files in it, and you want to delete everything, rm -rf * from within that folder should delete everything.  However, if there are too many files in the folder for this command to handle, you’ll get an error like this: /bin/rm: Argument list too …

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