Adding CPanel/WHM cPHulk IP Blocks to CSF & CloudFlare

JeffTechnical Articles & Notes

I’m running ConfigServer Firewall with its associated LFD (Login Failure Daemon) on one of my servers. LFD I believe does much the same job as cPHulk but advice I found online suggests that if resources aren’t hogged then enable both for a stronger setup. cPHulk has (in the CPanel/WHM control panel) an option to run an external command when an … Read More

Automatically Expiring CloudFlare IP Blocks by Age

JeffTechnical Articles & Notes

In my last post I talked about how to automatically add IP blocks to CloudFlare from your own server. I also talked about the problem that could lead to, which is potentially 1000s of IP blocks mounting up over time (leading to firewall performance issues, and hitting your CloudFlare IP block limit). I mulled over the best solution to this … Read More

Automatically Adding ConfigServer Firewall (CSF) Firewall Blocks to CloudFlare

JeffTechnical Articles & Notes

Unfortunately, having mod_cloudflare installed on ones server does not mean that the server’s front-end firewall (ConfigServer Firewall in one instance for me) sees the correct remote IP address for requests routed via CloudFlare. It appears mod_cloudflare (which is after all an Apache ‘mod’) works great for applications querying the REMOTE_ADDR server value from within Apache, but in many cases the … Read More

Block Distributed SMTP Auth Attacks, But Allow Google to Send SMTP via Server

JeffTechnical Articles & Notes

There’s a handy way to knock all distributed SMTP AUTH attacks on the head by switching off the advertising of SMTP AUTH to all but specified IP addresses and IP address ranges. It works perfectly. For details on how to achieve this on a WHM/cPanel server, see here: http://sysadmintips.in/advanced/csf/exim Great! However there’s a problem. Many many people like to use … Read More

CloudFlare & WHM/cPanel Apache Server Firewall Conflict

JeffTechnical Articles & Notes

CloudFlare adds another level of security and resilience in front of our dedicated server. It’s an excellent idea and for basic use, it’s completely free. Fab. However, there’s a problem. Because all server traffic which is routed via CloudFlare effectively comes from CloudFlare, and because it’s imperative CloudFlare’s IP address ranges are never blocked (because one bad apple would spoil … Read More

Optimising WordPress Installation For Google PageSpeed Insights

JeffTechnical Articles & Notes

I decided to implement Aetherweb’s own site using WordPress partly as a learning experience (it’s my first play with WordPress 4+) and partly because it made things quick and easy. As soon as I launched the new site live I navigated to Google PageSpeed insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ I discovered a considerable number of issues with image optimisation, above the fold javascript … Read More