Suhosin is a great and simple way of increasing your security without having a large impact on overall performance. In this tutorial I will cover the installation and configuration of Suhosin on both debian etch and centos 5. I may cover mod_security in a later tutorial.

They apt-get the packages needed for the patch in examples for two different distributions - Debian (etch) and CentOS. They also show how to set up some basic configuration to get the patch installed and working with your PHP installation.

Since a few days, there is a new package in Debian: php5-xdebug. After a few years of talking licenses, due to the help of Martin Meredith and Francois Marier Xdebug can finally be installed with apt-get.

XDebug is a debugging and profiling tool that adds additional information (more than just the usual "error on line..." sort of thing) to the output of your PHP scripts. It also adds more complex functionality like profiling and code coverage reports run on your applications.

This week I started to setup a Debian-based (Etch) web-server with PHP 5.2 in a virtual-machine with VMWare. Part of this setup was getting XDebug2 integrated. It's really awesome and my students definitely need to learn about it. [...] Building went well as usual but when I tried to integrate the extension inside php.ini it was all weird.

His system kept throwing him an error when he tried to load the shared module using the zend_extension directive, hand things happened. Loading it normally worked (so he knew it wasn't the module) and he finally figured out the problem:

But I need to enable it as Zend extension. Whatever. I finally used the full path to xdebug.so to load it [...] that worked.

This HowTo will describe the setup of an efficient http server and mail server for small or medium configurations (as low as 96 mb). So this config is ideal for a small VPS. You can find a good choice of cheap and performant VPS (XEN) at x|encon, a german hosting company. they provide many scalable VPS solutions with pre-installed Debian and Ubuntu disc images.

They have it broken out into five overarching steps for getting things working, but there's lots of little sub-steps you'll need to work through to get it up and running. Thankfully, most of the hard part (installing the packages) is handled through the apt-get command and you won't be required to compile.

Debian has issued an update for php4/5. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, cause a DoS (Denial of Service), and potentially compromise a vulnerable system.

You can get more information and links to the downloads here:

• PHP4 announcement
• PHP5 announcement

Debian has issued an update for php5. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions or by malicious people to potentially compromise a vulnerable system.

You can either grab the package with apt-get to get the latest or you can get it from one of the links in the advisory post for your architecture.

First off, it's recommended for Debian users to update the install of WordPress they currently have due to some vulnerabilities that leaves it open to SQL injections.

The advisory for wordTube recommends an update because of functionality that could cause the disclosure of sensitive information about the system.

Finally, the wp-Table plugin issue that's similar to the previous plugin issue making it possible to disclose information to the attacker.

Debian has issued an update for php4/php5. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions, malicious users to disclose potentially sensitive information or compromise a vulnerable system, and by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

Links to the advisory posts (that include the links to download the updated packages):

• For PHP4 Users
• For PHP5 Users

This tutorial shows how to install and configure Apache2 with PHP5 and PHP4 enabled at the same time. Because it is not possible to run both PHP5 and PHP4 as Apache modules, we must run one of them as CGI, the other one as Apache module. In this document I will use PHP5 as Apache module and PHP4 as CGI, and I will describe the setup for the Linux distributions Debian Sarge (3.1) and Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger).

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

They base the entire installation around Debian, so ideally you're set up on it or have some pretty good knowledge of linux in general. They apt-get install several packages, change some Apache config files, enable some modules, and restart things to get it all set up. The Ubuntu install is just about as easy, wiht only really a few items changed.]]> Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:27:53 -0600