Sys Admin Archives - Page 3 of 26

American Battery Company

2015/03/09 By staze Leave a Comment

Update 1: Got an email from the ABC manager asking what he could do to make it right, again stating their “We’re the only company to warranty our products for 2 years”, which, statistically, means nothing. I would imagine after looking at failure rates, they saw >80% of SLA batteries they source failed after 2 years, so there was no reason to not increase their warranty. Anyway, I responded that they could offer a discount on a new product, or at the very least, adjust their process so they’re not asking out of warranty customers to fill out an RMA form. I’ll post another update if I hear more…

Update 2: Okay, they’ve redeemed themselves. The manager that got ahold of me yesterday got back to me today and said he was shipping me a replacement today. He did apologize for rigamarole that I went through. So yes, the original post is moot. Thank you ABC for coming through on this.

Update 3: Got the battery. Interestingly, looks like it’s better built than the original. Thanks ABC!

Just over two years ago, I purchased a replacement battery for my APC Smart-UPS 1400. I’d used ABC batteries in the past, and hadn’t really seen anything wrong with them (or right, they just worked). Over the weekend, however, the battery that was, quite literally, a month and a half past it’s 2 year warranty, triggered an alert that it needed to be replaced.

I contacted ABC, and they said they’d consider the warranty, and had me fill out an RMA request. At this point, I had already told them when it was purchased, and that it was less than 2 months outside warranty. So, I filled out the request, and expected something positive to come of it (at least the option for a discounted replacement purchase). Instead, an hour later, I got a reply from the same person that had told me to fill out the RMA request, that they wouldn’t be able to help me. So, why the hell did they have me fill out the RMA request?

Needless to say, I have a very thin tolerance for shitty customer service (see some previous posts). When there are probably a solid dozen non-OEM battery companies out there wanting to get my business, why should I keep giving it to a company that doesn’t back their product when it fails JUST outside warranty, and doesn’t give any recourse, at all. I think Tommy Boy summed up this experience pretty well.

~~So, ABC is no longer someone I will be able to recommend, nor will I do business with them again.~~

fail2ban Wordpress and Cloudflare

2015/01/12 By staze Leave a Comment

Like most people that run a Wordpress site, or any CMS, I’ve struggled with brute force attacks on my site. Having just installed fail2ban on a mail server, this seemed like an obvious. Thankfully, as well, someone had already written a plugin for Wordpress to drop a message in the system log saying a login failed (by default, Apache doesn’t do this, it just shows someone hit the login page). At first, I had set up an iptables/pf rule to block the bad user, but for some reason, this wasn’t happening. My test browser kept hitting the page successfully.

After a break, I realized that I use Cloudflare, and of course blocking the offending IP wouldn’t work… it never actually connects to my host. Thankfully, Cloudflare has an API, and there was already a starting point for a fail2ban action, albeit, out of date (Cloudflare forces json now). Below is that action. You should be able to just call this like any other action, after you fill out the appropriate “token” and “email”.¹

Good luck!

fail2ban action

# Fail2Ban cloudflare action

#

# Author: Ryan Stasel

#

# $Revision$

#
[Definition]
# Option:  actionstart

# Notes.:  command executed once at the start of Fail2Ban.

# Values:  CMD

#

actionstart =
# Option:  actionstop

# Notes.:  command executed once at the end of Fail2Ban

# Values:  CMD

#

actionstop =
# Option:  actioncheck

# Notes.:  command executed once before each actionban command

# Values:  CMD

#

actioncheck =
# Option:  actionban

# Notes.:  command executed when banning an IP. Take care that the

#          command is executed with Fail2Ban user rights.

# Tags:    &lt;ip&gt;  IP address

#          &lt;failures&gt;  number of failures

#          &lt;time&gt;  unix timestamp of the ban time

# Values:  CMD

#

actionban = curl -s https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html -d 'a=ban' -d 'key=<ip>' -d 'email=<account>' -d 'tkn=<token>'

# Option: actionunban # Notes.: command executed when unbanning an IP. Take care that the # command is executed with Fail2Ban user rights. # Tags: <ip> IP address # <failures> number of failures # <time> unix timestamp of the ban time # Values: CMD # actionunban = curl -s https://www.cloudflare.com/api_json.html -d 'a=nul' -d 'key=<ip>' -d 'email=<account>' -d 'tkn=<token>' [Init] account = YOUR_CLOUDFLARE_EMAIL token = YOUR_CLOUDFLARE_TOKEN

Note: I had to disable “always online” with Cloudflare to have the block take effect within 5-10 seconds. With “always online” enabled, it took about 2-3 minutes to block the attack, all the while the “bot” was able to keep hitting my server. [↩]

iOS (and possibly Android) Chrome .htaccess allow

2015/01/07 By staze Leave a Comment

I have a couple websites I limit access to with apache .htaccess files. I also use Google Chrome on my iPhone, and for some reason, it was being blocked even though I specifically allow my internal subnet. Looking at the logs, I saw the request was coming from IP 66.249.84.145, or google-proxy-66-249-84-145.google.com. Ah! There’s a Data Saver feature in Chrome on iOS (guessing it’s there for Chrome on Android too). The iOS Chrome uses a Google proxy to download the webpage, do some compression/minification/etc, and then send it to the phone. They call this “Data Compression Proxy“. According to the App, it saves me about 20% of my data (which, I don’t care about when on Wifi, but on cell, it’s not a bad idea).

[Read more…]

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