Ahmad Mahfouz

Random notes

phpMyAdmin error #1146

#1146 – Table ‘phpmyadmin.pma_tracking’ doesn’t exist   this error indicates that phpmyadmin pages failed in setup  and you just ignored it in the setup process you need to reconfigure the package again  

  after you follow the reinstall steps it will setup the missing sql files for pma tables  

phpMyAdmin no password dev env

if you setup your development environment with no mysql root password after you setup phpmyadmin package it will land you with this error Login without a password is forbidden by configuration (see AllowNoPassword) to fix this error  vi  /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php find line : 96 ”    /* $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘AllowNoPassword’] = TRUE;” remove the comment /* $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘AllowNoPassword’] = TRUE;

Fix Mcrypt WARNING Ubuntu Server

today I faced problem in setup a mcrypt module I did install it via

when i did try to enable it via

I got this error root@ubuntu:/etc/php5/apache2/conf.d# php5enmod mcrypt WARNING: Not enabling the mcrypt module for apache2 SAPI since module symlink WARNING: already exists in /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d with different content. WARNING: Not enabling the

Docker Containers Crash Course

Docker Crash Course As Hypervisor is slow to boot and use a lot of resources and needs full installation the Container Technology not that old we used to use LXC – openVZ extra but what a cool about Docker is it really lightweight with awesome images build  and we can ship many services in one

audit keystrokes with pam

The pam_tty_audit PAM module is used to enable or disable TTY auditing. By default, the kernel does not audit input on any TTY this module is part of auditd and it takes  3 parameters 1 – disable  is a pattern to disable the module in specified users u can use =* to disable it globally

Protect Boot & Single user mode

as a physical security is the main factor in our security perspective we all need to protect unauthorised access to our Linux box after we protect bios and we all know that anyone can rest the root password via accessing the single mode so we have 3 ways 1st thing to disable single user mode entirely

SSH Tunnelling

the most famous method is using D parameter in ssh connection to bind a port local in your machine and this port tunnel back to our remote box to send our traffic to this server example

then you can configure your application and browser to use your local IP 127.0.0.1 with the port 1337

Secure/Lock accounts with PAM tally2

pam_tally2 is a PAM module to allow interaction in users interfaces on numbers of failed login attempt it can reset count on success, can deny access if too many attempts fail. this module is unique because it  not just reflect remote connection but also reflect the ttys and any system login method as it uses PAM example

password policy with pam_cracklib

cracklib pam module is a method to check the password against dictionary list and gives you availability to check the strength of the password and set rules to identify the poor passwords   here is the most important parameters for this module  minlen minimal password length dcredit maximum number of digits ucredit maximum uppercase letters

Pluggable Authentication Modules

Linux comes with Pam Modules to help you to interact with the running services in hardening way and custom the security of the service as you need. PAM is extra Rules to Control user interfaces ( Auth, Account, Session)  layers for the applications the applications/services should be compiled with libpam.so here is an example for