Creating FTP Allow/Deny Rules on Linux

Posted in: Blog, Security by Christian on September 6, 2009 | No Comments

When you login into your FTP account, before you are allowed to log in, the ftp daemon searches in your home directory for a file called “ftp.allow” to see if your IP address is specifically allowed to log in. In order to find out what you IP is go to: http://www.whatismyip.com If the file is found, and your IP address is permitted, no other checks are performed. If your IP address is not found in the list of allowed IPs, or the file is not found, the daemon searches for a file called “ftp.deny”, to see if your IP address is specifically denied. If the IP address you’re trying to connect to matches one of the entries in ftp.deny (which can be ALL: ALL  that denies everything that was not already permitted), the access will be denied with the message “530 User ‘username’ denied by access rules”. If the file is not found, or if your IP address doesn’t match anything, your access will be permitted. In addition to that, webshell access is always permitted (so you could modify the ftp.access and ftp.deny if you denied your own access by mistake). Read more…

WordPress: More Than A Blog Platform

Posted in: Blog, Web Design by Christian on August 27, 2009 | No Comments

When I started using Joomla a long time ago as a community based membership site I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. This also happened to be the same time when WordPress was known as just a blogging site. Joomla had good developer support with great plugins to increase functionality of a CMS system that provided easy content and got away from the standard Web 2.0 system (phpNuke, e107, etc.) of a 3 column community site with a forum and a couple other bells and whistles.

While Joomla had great backend 3rd party plugins like CRM, forums (VBulletin) and ecommerce bridge solutions like OS Commerce it was bloated and took a lot of time for a non-developer. Fast forward to today and WordPress has changed from a purely blogging focused platform to a more robust multi-dimensional website management tool without having an over abundance of programming knowledge.The great thing I love about WordPress now vs. then is that it has been easily adapted by programmers and plugin developers to be much more interactive and integrated with Social Media Networks for further exposure of marketing/advertising campaigns of a product or service. Read more…

10 Simple Rules of Etiquette for Twitter

Posted in: Social Media, Twitter by Christian on August 1, 2009 | No Comments

Simple Criteria for me to follow and engage you:

1. Picture of yourself or likeness.

2. Where you live. iPhone/Google longtitude/latitude numbers don’t count. That makes more work for me. I’m not going to stalk you.

3. Give me a description. It can be work or non work related. What you are passionate about will come through in your tweets.

4. Don’t auto-dm me upon follow. It is like getting a form letter from my congress person. Their secretary wrote it and stamped used the signature stamp.

5. Half your tweets must be @replies or RTs that you share common beliefs in. If you’re just tweeting information you’re traditionally old. You still haven’t got the point of Twitter. This includes you major news sources (CNN, WSJ, et al). You are not exempt if you’re not listening.

6. Change your Twitter background. Doing so shows you are a creative person and we all are creative in our own way. You could draw stick figures and I would find it better than someone who doesn’t take the time to care about public perception.

7. DON’T YELL. It won’t get your point across anymore.

8. Don’t RT major news all the time for the sake of karma. Nine times out of ten everybody else I am following has RTed the same thing too. Common bonds = common interests = common knowledge.

9. Your tweets must make sense. It is a 140 characters. Make sure you still use the lessons taught to you by your HS grammar teacher. I’m not going to click on a tweet with a bunch of buzz words thrown together.

10. Be yourself. Living in a PC world takes a lot of work. It forces you to live within certain constrains. It limits honest, openness, and ultimately communication. This is where you have to know your audience and find the balance between being funny and sarcastic or being mean and hurtful.