Lookout Mobile Security App
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Posted on August 6, 2011 by

As our cell phone become smart and contain more data they become larger and larger targets for virus and malware.  Android already has several known cases of malware and virus which can affect it.

An easy solution is to load in an app to protect you.  I have played with a few of them and I really like Lookout’s Mobile Security the best.  It provides several other features besides the protection and is completely free.  They do have a premium version you can purchase but the free one provides enough protection on it’s own.

Besides having the virus and malware scanner they also have a “Find My Phone” feature which will allow you from their website locate your phone or make your phone “scream” (even if it is on vibrate) to help you find it.

The third free thing they offer is a limited backup of your data.  The free version will only backup your contact.  The premium version will backup your call history and pictures as well.

The premium version besides offering more backup options will also provide “Privacy Advisor” which will “analyze apps that access your private information”, which is another thing many Android apps have been found guilty of.  They also provide a “Safe Browsing” feature in the premium version which protects you from phishing and malware links while you are surfing the web from your device.

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Lookout Mobile Security

 Lookout Mobile Security in the Android Market

Posted in Android, Android Apps | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Plan B for Android
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Posted on August 5, 2011 by

If you ever find your self in the terrible situation of having your phone lost or stolen there is a great free app by the people at Lookout Inc.

This app can be install from the Android Market, where it will automatically start itself up and send you an email with the location of your phone.  So even if you were not prepared for this situation you may not be out of luck.

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Plan B

Plan B on the Android Market

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Limit Number of Connections from an IP
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Posted on August 5, 2011 by

One of the problems you can sometimes face with a website is people mirroring your site or search bots excessively connecting to you.  This is very easy to fix by limiting the number of connections an IP address is allowed to make.

To do this you just need to install the mod_limitipconn Apache module.  If you are using Fedora or CentOS you can easily install this module through yum:

yum install mod_limitipconn

Once it is installed it is very easy to config.  You need to add the following line to your httpd.conf file:

LoadModule limitipconn_module modules/mod_limitipconn.so

Then you just need to add in the settings for the module.  I have included some samples below:

<IfModule mod_limitipconn.c>
<Location />
MaxConnPerIP 3
NoIPLimit image/*
NoIPLimit application/javascript
</Location>
<Location /phpmyadmin/*>
NoIPLimit *
</Location>
</IfModule>

The above settings consist of two parts, the location and then the settings for that location.  What is really nice is you can say certain folders are allowed more connections then others.  This is very important now that most browsers use multiple threads to download a single page.  This means that for a normal person to connect and view your website the browser may establish multiple connections.

In the above example you will see that I set the location to “/” (which means the entire site), then I say there is a MaxConnPerIP of 3, so I only want a max of three connections at a time from a single IP.  The next thing you will see is NoIPLimit image/* and NoIPLimit application/javascript.  Without these two settings multiple thread browser have a lot of problems loading pages since they often open up a connection for each of these content types plus one for the regular text on the site.  The other thing to keep in mind when doing this is that NoIPLimit is looking for a MIME type and not a path.

Now the other thing you may want to do is set section of the website where there will be no limit at all.  This is done again by setting the location (the example I used was phpmyadmin) and then saying NoIPLimit on any file type.

Posted in Apache, CentOS, Fedora | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stopping DOS Attacks with Mod_Evasive
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Posted on August 4, 2011 by

DOS attacks are becoming very common these days.  There are many different levels of DOS attack and monitoring your system and trying to prevent them all can be a full-time job.  However for the causal user you can easily add some basic DOS protection without much effort, especially if you are using Fedora or CentOS.

Fedora and CentOS both have mod_evasive in their main repositories so to install this you just need to run:

yum install mod_evasive

This mod comes basically ready to run without any modification.  I like to make a couple of changes to the settings so I can receive notices when a block is taking place.  To do this you just need to go to your apache conf.d directory and edit the mod_evasive.conf file.  To recieve email notifications when someone is blocked just enter your email address in the field DOSEmailNotify.  All of the other settings are fine the way they are.

Posted in Apache, CentOS, Fedora, Guides | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Easily Upgrade Fedora
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Posted on August 2, 2011 by

One of the downsides to using Fedora is that every six months there is another major release.  This can be annoying to keep up with but luckily Fedora has made it easy with the preupgrade command.

All you need to do is type in preupgrade at the command line interface and you will have a program pop-up on the screen which will upgrade your entire system automatically.

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