How to fix security loophole in Gentoo

Security is an ongoing matter for all the open system. So it's upto the guy who in charge of it and some company forces it too.In this article I will show you how you can fix the security hole in Gentoo.

Say you come to know that an security vulnarability has found on some particular and that software were loaded in your box.Here is how you can fix those:


bhaskar@bhaskar-laptop_15:03:56_Tue Jan 25:~> sudo glsa-check -f all
fixing 200812-12
fixing 200802-11
fixing 200705-23
fixing 200406-17
fixing 200804-13
fixing 200409-20
fixing 200708-01
fixing 200801-18
fixing 201001-04
fixing 201011-01
fixing 200909-11
fixing 200509-13
fixing 200612-16
fixing 200606-25
fixing 200405-22
fixing 200711-17
fixing 200510-19
fixing 201006-20
fixing 200602-08
fixing 200310-03
fixing 200506-16


....output is omitted for the sake of brevity, Yes,you spotted it right,glsa-check is an utility in Gentoo system to check security.Once it finished running then just run this command with different arguments; like below:


bhaskar@bhaskar-laptop_15:05:34_Tue Jan 25:~> sudo glsa-check -l affected
[A] means this GLSA was already applied,
[U] means the system is not affected and
[N] indicates that the system might be affected.


Now let me tell you that those alphabet in the left side within square bracket come with different colors. The A will be on normal white,the U will be green and the N in red.Important part to check how many N you have .

So,one tiny utility can do wonder,indeed.You can put it into the cron to run it periodically.

Hope this will help.

Cheers!
Bhaskar

MySQL : A little security tip

In this article I am going to show you a little trick about MySQL ,which might help you to prevent some attack on production database server.Every MySQL server has a root user attached to it and for intruders it's very easy to guess that and launch attack on it.

Here is how you can change the root user name for that MySQL server :


bhaskar@bhaskar-laptop_08:55:51_Thu Jan 13:~> sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 26
Server version: 5.1.51-log Gentoo Linux mysql-5.1.51

Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL v2 license

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql>use mysql;
mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where
User='';
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit


That's all!!

Hope this will help.

Cheers!
Bhaskar