LAMPdocs: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

Just wish to say: Happy New Year to everyone! Wish you not to meet such ATM machines in 2012!

If your Directadmin server faces a brute-force attack or script-kiddies are trying to guess your password, your message queue is full of messages. If you don’t check them periodically, you will have some problems deleting them.

I have been away for 2 weeks so I didn’t check my server for messages. When I came back, there were 2600 messages, and any attempt to list them all was unsuccessful. Since I know my users aren’t using the Directadmin Message system, it was safe to delete them.

In order to do this, you need to go to /usr/local/directadmin/data/tickets . You will see some folders there. These folders are full of messages, that are safe to delete. In order to find out, which folders you need to delete, you need to check /usr/local/directadmin/data/admin/tickets.list. When you see the list of messages, you may delete those you don’t need.

That’s pretty simple, and you may use this method for any other reseller. Just replace admin with your reseller name and check its message list.

Today I had to inspect what traffic does a program create. For browser traffic I usually use Fiddler (it’s free and it does the job). But it doesn’t suit for a software that doesn’t use proxies. So I had to find the solution, how to capture packets sent by my program (i don’t have any sources for the program so I cannot determine what traffic it should create).

I’ve tried many programs for that, but the solution that worked was Packetyzer. It doesn’t matter that most recent version is about 5 years old – it works great under Windows 7.

In order to get it working I downloaded the program binary (you can find the link above) and installed it. The program didn’t start at its first run, so I had to install another software named Winpcap. I’ve used default settings for both programs so there are no tricks for this installation.

To start capturing the traffic you need to start Packetyzer. It asks for a new session – check “Automatic scrolling” and click “OK”.

Then choose Session->Start Capture

You’re done. Every packet that goes through your network interface will now be shown in Packetyzer.