Big data security is everyone’s responsibility.  Using weak passwords or entering your password from compromised workstations can undermine your organization’s entire infrastructure.  Even on a workstation free of trojans, viruses, and software based keyloggers, there is still a threat from hardware keyloggers.

Hardware based keyloggers for USB and PS/2 devices, such as keyboards and mice, are very affordable and easy to conceal. For $40-$60 anyone can buy a hardware keylogger and introduce it in your environment. You may not even notice that one has been attached between your keyboard and your PC.  This is especially true with larger offices that have interns, cleaning crews, delivery couriers, and others frequenting their place of business.  It does not even have to be an outsider trying to infiltrate your infrastructure – the threat could come from users with lower level access who would like to gain access to accounting, billing, or research and development information.  Once they have your credentials, there is nothing that a client – server architecture can do to stop them from using it, or is there?

The last line of defense is a two-factor authentication. You don’t have to buy expensive key fobs or recurring licenses to get it to work.  Although there are commercial products out there that provide two factor authentication, most of them have a commercial interest, offer complex setup, and a solution that only works on one phone or standalone device.  Google Authenticator is a good choice because it can be used on multiple devices as well as your desktop.  If you prefer to use your own implementation, there are simple solutions based on Time-based One-time Password Algorithms (TOTP).  The code is publically available and mathematically sound.  It is worth mentioning that the clocks need to be in sync, but the drift rate can be as high as a second and still remain usable. For simplicity, we’ll use QR barcodes with Google Authenticator.

Generating a QR code can be accomplished by using Google Charts Tools.  For example, to generate a QR code for key ‘secretkey’ we need to convert ‘secretkey’ to base32 first. Make sure to pick your own combination.

Using Python:

>>> import base64
>>> base64.b32encode('secretkey')

'ONSWG4TFORVWK6I='

Now you can generate a QR code for any account using that secretkey.  Suppose your account name is username@domain.com and combined with base32 encoded key from above, the URL to generate a QR code is:

https://www.google.com/chart?chs=200×200&chld=M|0&cht=qr&chl=otpauth://totp/username@domain.com?secret=ONSWG4TFORVWK6I=

You can import this account into your Google Authenticator by scanning the barcode:

Google Authenticator data can also be physically backed up since it is just a SQLite database file located in /data/data/com.google.android.apps.authenticator/databases/databases on your Android device.  Your device would have to be rooted in order to access that folder.  Unfortunately the file is not encrypted, so losing your device is not recommended.

On rooted Android with Terminal Emulator, the file can be read directly:

# su
# sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.apps.authenticator/databases/databases
sqlite> select * from accounts;

10|username@domain.com|ONSWG4TFORVWK6I=|0|0|0

If you lost your phone or iOS device where you have Google Authenticator installed, you would have to login to your Google account and revoke the keys.  If you have made a backup of the database file, you can either re-create the barcode and enter it on another device, or obtain the 6 digit combination directly using the following Python code (make sure to change my_secret to your own value).

import hmac, base64, struct, hashlib, time

def get_hotp_token(secret, intervals_no):
    key = base64.b32decode(secret, True)
    msg = struct.pack(">Q", intervals_no)
    h = hmac.new(key, msg, hashlib.sha1).digest()
    o = ord(h[19]) & 15
    h = (struct.unpack(">I", h[o:o+4])[0] & 0x7fffffff) % 1000000
    return h

def get_totp_token(secret):
    return get_hotp_token(secret, intervals_no=int(time.time())//30)

my_secret = '4V5OYJGQ5PIZXINF'
my_token = get_totp_token(my_secret)
print my_token

As you can see it closely matches what is displayed on Google Authenticator:

Tune in next time when we cover how to incorporate TOTP authentication into your infrastructure.

Magento is a powerful and incredibly flexible ecommerce program. While the expansive ecommerce platform offers an enormous amount of store customization, a slow loading online site will do little to entice a customer to buy its product. An optimized server running Magento, on the other hand, can offer a strong performance, resulting in higher sales and happier customers. To ensure the lowest system loads and best possible response time, ServerStack works to optimize many aspects of the Magento servers.

ServerStack begins its optimization of Magento from the ground up. Before even opening one configuration file, customers are on a foundation of dedicated Dell Servers. Once customers are established on their fast and scalable servers, ServerStack provides its customary high level of service, configuring PHP and MySQL to work best with Magento.

As Magento is written in PHP, ServerStack ensures that the language is processed as effectively as possible. Nginx is set as a reverse proxy to the Apache web server, allowing Nginx to serve the required static content while Apache does the heavy lifting needed for PHP. Furthermore, ServerStack uses APC for caching—choosing it because of its effective integration with PHP. APC is not only written by PHP developers, but will be officially integrated with PHP6.

At the same time, ServerStack works to configure MySQL, keeping access to the backend database fast and secure. With over a decade of experience in the hosting industry, ServerStack implements their time-tested MySQL configuration to further increase Magento performance.

However, optimizing an application is only half of the equation. The general behavior of any application on a server is most dependent on the actual coding behind the site. For this reason, once Magento is installed, ServerStack continues the dialogue with the customer, ready to fine-tune the application. After Magento is installed, configured, and optimized on the customer’s dedicated server, ServerStack employees let the user try it out and answer any specific questions that they may have about how to keep it running at its peak level. ServerStack streamlines the entire process so that the customer can focus on selling their product instead of shuffling through manuals.

When the site goes live, ServerStack continues to manage Magento fully. Server graphs are monitored consistently, checking how the server manages with the load put on it. Should there be evidence of swap, ServerStack employees investigate the cause: they implement minor configuration changes for small issues or fully provision the server if more attention is needed.

ServerStack also stands by as soon as the customer needs to scale. When milliseconds count with customer conversions, ServerStack wants to ensure that a giant site runs just as well as a growing one.

No matter your ecommerce needs, Magento provides an incredibly powerful and flexible platform. To harness it better, and to spend your time driving sales instead of configuring, scaling, and testing, ServerStack takes on all the backend work and supports you in your business.

Fellow nerds!  If there’s anything that has a tendency to work up linux guys, it’s text editors.  And in general, people tend to traditionally gravitate towards two camps: camp emacs or camp vi.   While other newer software exists, such as nano, pico, or joe – it’s important to be comfortable using vi and emacs.  vi will be available pretty much everywhere you need it, and emacs, when installed, is intensely featureful.   Besides, using these two editors are a bit of right of passage — you don’t want to look like a nano-using weakling the rest of your life, do you?  (ducks)

Your humble narrator is a vim user, and so we’ll take a look at a few relics from the past that are still used day to day.

Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun) wrote vi over 30 years ago, and us system administrators have been self-flagellating with it ever since.  Prior to vi, people at that time were editing files with a command called ed.  Working with ed must have been an exercise in frustration – it was meant for use on dumb terminals, so in order to modify files you had to work line by line, like this:

[root@xen2 ~]# echo 'line 1
> line 2
> line 3' > file
[root@xen2 ~]# ed file
21
2
line 2
2d
2i
oh god help me
.
2
oh god help me
w
29
q
[root@xen2 ~]# cat file
line 1
oh god help me
line 3
[root@xen2 ~]#

Now just imagine editing a sendmail configuration like that without wanting to rip your eyes out.

Mr. Joy wrote an improved version of ed called, ex.  From there, he continued to build on it so it was able to use the terminal in such a way that it was a visual editor instead of a line editor.  And thus vi came to be.

Those line editor roots are still present in vi, and actually can provide great shortcuts.   For instance in command mode:
Easy search and replace of string1 for string2

:%s/string1/string2/

Remove all lines that just contain whitespace:

:g/^\s*$/d

Occasionally with files from a windows box, there might be some stray line-feed characters in the file.  You can easily remove them with:

:%s/^M//

Note: The ^M in the command actually is inputed: Ctrl-V Ctrl-M

To explain what’s happening in these commands, the initial colon begins the ex command.  Then the % stands for all lines in the file.  If you wanted to specify certain lines, you could express it like:  :1s/string1/string2/
Translated, that’s “Computer!  Please substitute string1 for string2 on line 1″.  Things that are in the first front slashes are regular expressions – meant for matching strings.  Learning and utilizing regular expressions are a key skill that makes life so much easier when utilized properly.

As arcane as some of this can be, it really is worth the effort to learn it.  These shortcuts will save you time over your career at the CLI, and it’s very likely that vi is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Nginx, a web server exported from chilly Russia, was officially found to be the 2nd most popular webserver for active websites in June of 2012 by Netcraft. In terms of overall marketshare, the study placed it third, behind Apache and Microsoft IIS. However, considering that the server’s first public release was in 2006, the software’s growth has been nothing short of exponential.

Nginx is now the official web server for over 60 million domains and services some of the internet’s most trafficked sites, such as Hulu, Facebook, Netflix, Instagram, and WordPress. Its rapidly growing popularity and great reception make it a force to be reckoned with for competitors and a great help to developers looking to set up a fast and efficient site.

How exactly does nginx achieve blazing speeds? It sets itself apart from the other top web server powerhouses (such as apache) by being able to handle an enormous amount of concurrent connections. Nginx architecture does not require each connection to spin up a a new process.

Instead of Apache’s threaded method, Nginx speeds up server performance by using an asynchronous event-driven approach. The software responds quickly to server requests and serves static files at the brisk pace: javascript, CSS, various media, and movies charge through the nginx infrastructure at high speeds.

Nginx is also easy to scale. When it works as a reverse proxy, the program can be a powerful load balancer, spreading connections out across as many available servers as needed. This increases the speed of each server and beefs up the security—nginx offers sophisticated Denial of Service Attack protection by dividing the harmful and harmless traffic and dealing with them separately.

All of this highlights one of nginx’s greatest strengths: its flexibility. Depending on the situation, nginx can either act as an independent web server or be configured as a reverse proxy with an application server behind it to process the dynamic code (like php, python, perl, and others).

While the program is nearly unparalleled in the way that it serves static files, making it into a reverse proxy can increase speed even more. Combining nginx with an application server behind it (apache is great choice for the job) allows nginx to continue serving site visitors while the application server works through the meatier back end.

What started eight years ago as a way for the giant Russian site Rambler to process its hundreds of millions daily requests has now become a sleek, efficient, useful program that can speed up the processes of any server. It may only serve around 10% of the internet’s domains now, but nginx moves quickly, and that percentage can only keep zooming up.

Yes, there are a lot of options in the crowded managed hosting space. However, if you are considering a managed hosting provider, there are few important questions that you will need to answer:

1) Are they reliable and stable?

2) What is the level of support that I will be receiving?

3) Will my site be able to scale effectively while experiencing maximum performance?

Sometimes, these question can be difficult to answer and that is why we’ve gone ahead and answered them for you. =]

Answer #1: ServerStack’s SLA guarantees that your website will experience 100% uptime in any give month, excluding scheduled maintenance. Any experienced downtime would immediately be reimbursed back to the customer. No questions asked! We have seven of the best data centers across the US and Europe, with flagship locations in New Jersey and Amsterdam.

Answer #2: ServerStack takes pride in setting the standard in the managed hosting industry by providing the best support out there. ServerStack likes to refer to our level of support as “White Glove” service. The kind of high-end support that will bend over backwards to answer and resolve any issue while at the same time, insuring that your site is being properly monitored, managed, backed-up, and optimized 24/7. No other managed hosting provider can compete on the level of service that we provide. How do we do this? It is simple. Our 24/7 support team is comprised of system administrators and engineers that manage your dedicated servers around the clock. Unfortunately, if you go with a large managed hosting provider, 99% of the time you will have to speak to the first “layer” of support that will have to escalate any major issues to the layers above them for it to be resolved. Yes, this is the harsh reality.

We are so confident that you will be pleased with our level of support that we offer all customers a Support Guarantee! This guarantee states that if you are not fully satisfied with our support, at anytime, we will fully refund your money and give back your data. No cancellation/termination fee will be applied.

Answer #3: ServerStack is the industry leader in scaling web infrastructures. Ok, ok – we know, everyone says that they are the “Leader.” How can we be so sure, right?! Well, it is simple. We’ve scaled the largest website out of any hosting provider in the world…period. And here is how we did it! The site now receives approximately 150 million pageviews per day and is an Alexa Top 50 website. This website started out with a single dedicated server and grew to a multi-cluster configuration that is managed by the ServerStack team.

If you are at all hesitating to try us out…please don’t! We are willing to offer your first month of managed hosting for free. No set-up fee or contract required. You can cancel at anytime.

If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact our sales department or stop by our office in downtown Manhattan (SoHo) to say hello.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — January 26, 2012 — Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), a provider of global data center services, today announced that ServerStack, a provider of managed hosting services, will continue to leverage its presence within the Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers to deliver high-end managed hosting services including virtualization, storage, load balancing, VPN and CDN. Since joining Platform Equinix™ in 2008, ServerStack has drawn upon the standardization, consistency and network connectivity within the Equinix IBX data centers in New York and Silicon Valley to significantly grow its North American customer base and ensure it delivers on its promise of 100 percent uptime for its hosting customers. ServerStack has also opened a storefront in the Equinix Marketplace™ to promote and sell its services to the more than 4,000 potential customers that are on Platform Equinix.

As part of Equinix’s growing ecosystem of more than 800 cloud and IT service providers, ServerStack offers managed hosting solutions and powerful dedicated servers that are backed by unparalleled network, server, and application support. Originally launched in 2003, the company delivers proven solutions for some of the most demanding hosting needs, including highly available websites, PCI-compliant e-commerce sites, SaaS platforms, and virtualization. ServerStack also offers load balancing and firewall security as well as network storage and CDN services, in highly available configurations.

“At ServerStack, our number one goal is to ensure 100 percent uptime for our customers. In order to achieve that, it is crucial that our data center service provider offer the stability, security and compliance necessary for us to follow through on that promise,” said Ben Uretsky, CEO of ServerStack. “We specifically chose to work with Equinix because of the company’s superior stability and scalability. In the many years we have been with Equinix, we have never experienced any outages. In addition, the company’s unparalleled network connectivity enables us to reach any network provider within the Equinix ecosystem. Equinix also has the global reach we need as we expand our business both nationally and worldwide.”

“As more and more companies look to partners such as ServerStack to provide a vast array of hosting solutions in a secure and high-performance manner, it’s imperative that hosting providers can adapt to customers’ needs in a dynamic and secure environment,” said Vince DiMemmo, general manager of global cloud and IT services at Equinix. “We are thrilled to help a company like ServerStack, along with our other partners in the cloud and hosting space, achieve success in delivering performance-optimized solutions.”

Internap’s Performance IP service optimizes Internet traffic by leveraging the company’s patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology – which dynamically determines the best path for traffic across multiple Internet backbones based on network performance characteristics. Performance IP is backed by a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA.)

An additional 10Gigabit uplink utilizing Internap’s Performance IP was installed at ServerStack’s North Bergen facility to increase network capacity and redundancy. The upgrade allows ServerStack to provide a higher quality of service for customers with sensitive applications such as video, streaming, and voice over IP.

“To our customers, having a performance-optimized network that runs on 10GigE links means stability and scalability for future growth,” said Ben Uretsky. “ServerStack is committed to providing its customers the highest level of service, starting from the network layer, and extending to the OS and software management.”

Utilizing 10G connectivity from the Core to the top of rack switches allows customers to spike their bandwidth utilization without hitting network bottlenecks. Through incremental roll-outs our schedule looks to have the 10G network fully deployed by late August.

Managed Technical Support

Instead of dedicating themselves to server maintenance, customers of managed hosting receive full 24×7 technical support. This extends further than simply the consistent availability of live support to address server issues (via phone, email, and instant messaging clients); it includes other benefits, such as operating system and full application management. Managed servers are always kept up to date with the latest OS updates and security patches; all business applications running on the servers are supported, managed, and optimized to run quickly without downtime.

Proactive Monitoring

A managed hosting company monitors all aspects of server activity to make sure that valuable content stays online. Whether investigating a traffic spike from a marketing campaign or an unauthorized hot link to a client’s site, a managed hosting company is aware of unusual activity and can appropriate steps to ensure the website or application is always available. Server management includes URL content monitoring, which checks that the site is not only online but that the web pages load correctly, an essential function for keeping the content of websites with complex applications and critical pages consistently available to visitors. Outsourcing the task of managing a server provides the client with security that, at every point in time, technical support staff is ready to address any technical issues to ensure that the customer’s information is online and accessible.

Network Security

Maintaining a server’s security is essential. On managed servers, the hosting company takes over the laborious task of protecting it from trojans, hackers, and spammers. The stored information is protected with Firewall services and regular server vulnerability scans. Employing hardened Linux server configurations, the hosting company creates a secure environment protecting the customer’s data with VPN connectivity, secure SSH connections, and additional multi-factored authentication.

Server Optimization

Not all server issues arise from a malicious source like viruses or targeted attacks by hackers. There are many reasons why dedicated servers may not be running at peak capacity, and a key benefit of managed hosting is optimizing server performance. Using SNMP to collect performance metrics in real time regarding CPU utilization, load averages, RAM utilization, and hard drive usage, a managed hosting company provides the right service configuration for each customer’s traffic levels. Optimization also includes troubleshooting application performance and OS level issues to ensure reliable service availability.

Web Scalability

When a site or business begins to require stronger server infrastructure to keep up with its needs, managed hosting makes the transition from a single dedicated server to a multi-server cluster simple. The advantage of a technical support staff expanding the capacity of a dedicated server comes from its best practices approach to growing resources. They make sure that separate servers are optimized for specific tasks as database, web, or application processing servers. Once the content is migrated from one to many servers, the company can implement load balancing to maintain an efficient distribution of traffic across the servers. The technical staff performs all these motions, and the server’s user is never tasked with changing configurations or managing the technical aspect of their increased server capacity.

Managed Hosting Server Migrations

Managed hosting companies help the client by migrating their content, databases, and software configuration. When done correctly, it provides for zero-downtime migrations, where the customer can switch DNS after the technical staff has adapted the website’s setup and performed a resource review, ensuring the new server will run based on the company’s best practices.

Automatic Server Backup

As information continues to grow keeping data secure in the case of hardware failure, accidental deletion, developer error, or attack intrusion is of the utmost importance. A managed server hosting company performs automated daily backups and saves the data separately, making the files and databases available for immediate retrieval in the case of disaster. In addition to all server files, databases are backed up via their native mechanisms to ensure data integrity. Backups are performed daily, storing incremental data and allowing quick and easy file recovery.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Managed server hosting may seem more expensive than having an unmanaged server, however, the costs are not directly comparable. Unless the client has a background of the proper technical knowledge, skills, and training, and the time to allocate to optimizing their applications, monitoring their server traffic, creating systematic backups, continually upgrading their OS, and ensuring their server remains secure against malicious entities, they would still have to hire IT personnel to manage the server. Managed server hosting provides lower total cost of ownership and enables the customer to achieve more than they would on their own. The customer has the security of a powerful and highly available server without the price tag attached to having an in-house team supporting it.

Contact us to discuss a fully managed hosting solution that will fit your specific needs.

“Our customers expect their IT resources on-demand, meaning we can’t use traditional storage since it doesn’t scale quickly or cost-effectively,” said Ben Uretsky, CEO, ServerStack. “Isilon solves this problem because it actually is on-demand storage. Now, our customers can scale out applications in a single share without worrying about storage limitations, while management stays simple on our end.”

The announcement comes months after tests out our facilities in the NYC Metro Area and San Jose have shown Isilon to be a reliable, flexible, and most importantly scalable product that allowed our largest customers to continue growing their online assets without being forced to rewrite their applications.

“ServerStack is one of many hosting and cloud providers helping usher in an era of shared, on-demand IT, which will enable greater business efficiency, cost reduction and productivity,” said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. “By using Isilon to simplify data management and eliminate storage restrictions for its customer base, ServerStack is positioned to be a leader in managed hosting services for years to come.”