One of my earliest memories of Linux was of slackware. The hardcore distro, the most unix-like Linux of all Linuxes, it enshrined my geekyness. Our revered maestro is Pat Volkerding.

Linux is widespread now mainly because of Canonical’s ubuntu. It’s ease of use, it just ‘works’.

This establishes a 2-tier system of Linux that only previously existed in basement-source forum arguments. RPM versus source distributions.

If you’re not too familiar with this, RPM is so named after the RedHat Package Manager system. It provides generic packages of applications and daemons that can work out of the box. Coupled with a package manager such as yum or apt-get, it can be an effective tool to get a Linux installation on its feet quickly and without much effort.

‘yum install httpd php php-mysql mysql-server perl’ is a common command for a RPM source distro admin. It resolves everything and ‘just works’.

Source is a bit different. But it has the alluring draw that it can be faster, more secure, totally customised. It requires more work than RPM distributions for obvious reason. Rather than automatic package dependency resolution, it needs building to work with each package that you choose to install.

It doesn’t half teach you about Linux though.

3dpixel.net has been running RPM based, CentOS for several years. Mainly because of the compatibility with the Plesk control panel. Plesk is rpm based and has no source package installation.

We’ve decided now to switch to a self-built slackware based control panel for two reasons.

1. Plesk costs an absolute fortune and is perpetual. We’re leasing this software and so are our customers.
2. We’ve discovered a few major bugs in the plesk control panel that we won’t share here, but plesk are not forthcoming with any fixes. As they lock down their control panel we cannot effectively close these holes without major software edits.

I’ll post some in-development blog posts over the coming weeks on our experiences on building a source based control panel.

Our customers, prepare for an upgrade you won’t believe!

All customers of BT retail or BT business who currently use our SMTP services are advised to change their outgoing email server to BT’s own system.

BT themselves add a positive RBL (blacklist) spam score (i.e. more spam) to all BT customers who do not use their own BT outgoing mail servers despite authentication and SSL.

Please reference: http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL231592

We find this situation quite disturbing considering BT only offer plain SMTP authentication and not SSL as we do, nor do they offer domainkey or SPF validation for your domain.

This morning, a site hacker compromised many index files on customers’ sites on cobalt.3dpixelnet.com. This was done via a rogue shell / linux script on another customer’s account which had very insecure folder permissions.

We are pleased to report that immediately following this attack, we replaced all the compromised files from our offsite backup platform and closed the security hole the attacker exploited.

Unfortunately, the attack is common against shared hosting platforms and whilst customers do not see any issues in general, the platforms are under constant attack from such hackers. Of course, it only takes one successful attempt to cause issues we’ve seen today.

We are taking a security review on how we can better protect the systems against such attacks in the future. We hope customers are reassured of our backup procedures after this event.

Please email support@3dpixel.net should you have any further questions.