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Mixing Basic Auth And IP Access Controls

In some cases you might want to require HTTP Basic authentication to a site but allow specific IP addresses to skip the username/password. For Apache this can be configured with:

For nginx the configuration is:

 

 

 

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Turn off Keep-Alive for directory

Recently had a problem where Chrome browsers were not fully downloading a large PDF document. The first few 100KB would download but then the document would stop loading.

After some debugging we concluded that Keep-Alive in Apache was creating the problem. We didn’t want to disable KeepAlive for the entire server so instead we added this line to the .htaccess file containing the PDF files:

 

 

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Enable Compression On Plesk With Nginx

To enable compression on a Plesk server with Nginx handling static content, had to add the following to .htaccess:

This configuration is explained here: https://www.a2hosting.com/kb/developer-corner/apache-web-server/data-compression-using-the-mod-deflate-module

And then in Plesk under:

Subscriptions -> acme.com -> Websites & Domains -> Web Server Settings -> Additional nginx directives

added the following:

The Nginx configuration is explained here: http://www.nginxtips.com/how-to-configure-nginx-gzip-compression/

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Redirect With Query String

Let’s say you have URL like this:

http://acme.com/my-old-url

that you want to redirect to a new url:

http://acme.com/new-url

This is easily accomplished with a rewrite rule:

But what if the source URL has a url parameter like:

http://acme.com/my-old-url?id=27

In this case we need to use  RewriteCond to match the url parameter:

Notice the question mark (?) at the end of “/new-url?”. This causes the query string to be discarded. If the question mark is not included then the redirect will go to:

http://acme.com/new-url?id=27

If you want to keep the query string then you can explicitly add it with the QSA option like:

Also in Apache 2.4 and latter the QSD option can be used to exclude the query string with the same effect at the trailing question mark:

 

 

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How-to Mitigate Bittorrent DDOS Attacks

You’ll know that you’re getting hit with a Bittorrent attack when the server slows down and you see log entries referencing:

Here’s a good article about one sysadmin’s struggle with this type of attack:

http://blog.carlesmateo.com/2015/01/23/stopping-a-bittorrent-ddos-attack/

There are a number of possible strategies to mitigate this attack:

1. CloudFlare will block but it can take time to move DNS to CloudFlare and activate.

2. Create an announce.php file that returns an error like this:

This will use fewer resources then letting WordPress or other CMS return a 404.

3. Block in iptables with a rule like this:

Not sure how efficient this is on a high traffic web server.

4. Block in Apache config:

5. Block with fail2ban as described here:

http://shazbert.com/blog/2015/01/24/fail2ban-china-ddos-announce-bittorent/

Note that Plesk 12 has fail2ban built-in so this fix is easy to implement.

6. If traffic is limited to a range of IP addresses then block that range in any available firewall. For example we’ve defeated this attack in one case by blocking a class B range from China.

Other suggestions on blocking this type of attack are welcomed. Comment below and let us know if you’ve seen this attack and how you handled it.

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