IT Dribble

Again after the fun times of being to cheap too pay for a good provider and hosting this website from a low end VPS with limited memory running WordPress and MySql, I have finally tuned it so that it no longer uses swap! yay!

Anyway I had trouble getting permalinks working and knowing nothing about them I set off in my investigation. It appears that permalinks require mod_rewrite to be enabled. After checking in mods_avaliable and search debian repos, I came up blank. It seems that you need to enable mod_rewrite via the command

 a2enmod rewrite 

Too Easy!

After moving from web hosting to a low spec VPS Provider (read: less ram) I noticed the following errors in my apache2/access.log:

vps suhosin[10882]: ALERT – script tried to increase memory_limit to 268435456 bytes which is above the allowed value (attacker ‘MY.IP.ADD.RESS’, file ‘/var/www/blog/wp-admin/admin.php’, line 109)

When trying to access parts of the WordPress dashboard. The required fix was that WordPress wanted 256MB of memory (which I didn’t have).

The fix involved editing: wp-includes/default-constants.php
line 28: define( ‘WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’256M’ );
to something a little more reasonable like 64M

Just a quick post with a link of some great security videos: http://www.securitytube.net and a interesting blog: http://r00tsec.blogspot.com.au

Had an interesting scenario at a clients yesterday. After a recent upgrade of their infrastructure of Blackberry Enterprise Server to Service Pack 2 MR 2 they couldn’t sign into the BES Console with both Active Directory credentials or local BES accounts. It seems that they had two compounding issues one was that SQL database for BesMgmt had corrupted fields for the admin account. When they tried to sign in with the local BES admin account they received the error (at DEBUG Level 3) :

Caused by: org.hibernate.PropertyAccessException: Null value was assigned to a property of primitive type setter of com.rim.bes.bas.usermanager.entity.UserEntity.failedLoginCount
 at org.hibernate.property.BasicPropertyAccessor$BasicSetter.set(BasicPropertyAccessor.java:85)
 at org.hibernate.tuple.entity.AbstractEntityTuplizer.setPropertyValues(AbstractEntityTuplizer.java:337)
 at org.hibernate.tuple.entity.PojoEntityTuplizer.setPropertyValues(PojoEntityTuplizer.java:200)
 at org.hibernate.persister.entity.AbstractEntityPersister.setPropertyValues(AbstractEntityPersister.java:3570)
 at org.hibernate.engine.TwoPhaseLoad.initializeEntity(TwoPhaseLoad.java:129)
 at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.initializeEntitiesAndCollections(Loader.java:854)
 at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQuery(Loader.java:729)

I traced this fault to the SQL database – BESMgmt. Within the table BASUsers there is a column called: failedLoginCount in that row the admin user had a “failedLoginCount” of NULL, I then replace this field to 0 (zero) and the admin account worked again.

Next issue when they tried to manage certain users the console raised the error: “The request could not be completed” I then traced this fault to the same table BASUsers and again those users had NULL fields in the column “failedLoginCount” replacing NULL with 0 then allowed the user to be managed once again.

The client was now happy that they could sign in and administer their users once again. But Active Directory Authentication was still broken and they weren’t prepared to spend any more time on it, so I packed up tools and rode off into the sunset.

Its a small file and a big download if you want to get it from Microsoft, So I’ll host it here until M$ tell me to stop. Download Devcon.exe 32bit Windows 7 Version