Various Updates

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CLDMV has opened a Development portion to our business. With this clients or anyone for that matter can contact us for web development. We are also partnered with 1stwebstudio for design projects. So all that’s left is to offer is domains, SSLs, SEO. While we do provide domains and SSLs already there is no automation in this process.

Also CLDMV has opened a Twitter and Tumblr account for people who wish to follow updates and posts through those forms of media. The blog site has also had some minor changes in design related to social networking.

Moving forward we excited to be able to provide most web related services to existing and new clients. We are still looking for a reliable and friendly service for SEO.

DKIM Signing and Mail filtering

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Spam is always a concern when you have email. We have successfully integrated DKIM signing to our email system. As it can break mail delivery this is not done automatically. DNS records need to be in place for it to work properly. Thus if you’re hosted at CLDMV please contact us in order to help you with the process of setting up DKIM.

Next upgrade we have put in place is our own custom mail filter. Right now there isn’t much to it but injecting a header into emails to show it working. But soon there will be SMTP Relay limits (used to prevent compromised emails from flooding emails outbound), Custom spam filtering though DB rules, and probably some other things which I’m not thinking of currently.

The two main issues we had with putting our own Filter in place was the ability to maintain our Anti-Virus and Spam systems that were already in place while also being able to provide a second content filter. After many hours and tons of caffeine we were able to produce a system which kept our current system intact while adding the secondary system on top of it. As always Security in this manner was a great concern. Especially considering we would be handling external content. Several limitations are at play in current mail systems which caused us to create innovate techniques in order to send emails to our own system securely. We even attempted to hack our own mail server through emails and were unsuccessful.

New feature for JS and CSS

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Any website hosted with CLDMV can now automatically serve up concatenated JS and CSS files. For example:

http://cdn.cldmv.net/cldmv/min/cldmv/jquery/?base64.js,decode.js

The above URL is two separate files put together and minified as well. Now lets go over the portions of the URL:

The prefix of the URL (this is required in order to get the script to work.

The directory:

Then the marker to indicate the files you want to serve (this is required and never changes):

Then finally the files you want to serve under the above directory:

Each file is separated by a comma.

Normally to get both of these scripts to run you would include the follow urls:

Instead you can now just include:

Update: Since Chrome has an issue with double question marks I’ve reduced the code to only require a single question mark.

 

Server Updates along with Security Updates

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As always security is a main concern in our network. We have updated a couple services already and are in the process of updating a few more services currently.

First we have updated NGINX (our webserver) with a few additional modules which will allow us to do a few more optimizations.

We have also increased the SSL security levels. There are some downsides to this. However we believe the upsides outway the downsides.

Cons:

  • Support for IE6 on XP SSL connections have been removed completely.
  • Support for Java6 SSL connections have been removed completely.
  • Support for YandexBot 3.0 SSL connections have been removed completely.

Note: The above were already not supported as none of them support SNI (Server Name Indication). SNI is how SSL connections are defined by domain names rather than IPs. Since our network serve SSL connections based upon Domain names primarily and IPs secondary. Thus the support for the above methods of viewing a SSL site were spotty at best.

Pros:

  • SSL Security score went from 90% to 96.25%, a 6.25% increase.
  • Encryption Speed has been increased.
  • SSL connections now have a subsidiary encryption which helps even more against MITM attacks.
  • Possible BEAST exploit has been removed completely.
  • Possible Lucky Thirteen exploit has been removed completely.
  • Possible CRIME exploit has been removed completely.

Note: Above exploits above were possible due to Encryption methods which were available in the server to support the above methods of a SSL connection. With these removed the possible exploits are removed as well.

Current Status of Control Panel, security updates, and server updates

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First lets start with a screen shot of the dashboard in progress for the control panel.

current-cp

Unfortunately Data prior to the 28th of May 2014 is a bit skewed. But as you can see we have plenty of navigation so consumers never get lost. We also show are currently showing all site traffic for all sites hosted under a specific user. Though with some crashes here and there we might put these charts on their own separate page per domain but still give the user the ability to view an all domain report as it’s setup right now (at their own risk).

Currently the theming for the charts is still to be completed. But we have the ability to show and hide specific points of data if we want, select a range of the data from the range bar below. And most importantly reset it all to dive into more data.

Updates outside of the control panel:

A lot of reforming to the back-end has happened in preparation of the control panel.

Security is always a concern when dealing with the online world. We have adjusted some security features. The control panel (unlike commercial panels today) will not actually be able to modify anything within the network per-say. What I mean by that is every command done through the control panel will actually hit a sub-system which allows or disallows access at that level. Which then hits the root system which can only run specific commands pre-written into the system. So unlike most control panels today where the code is on the forefront of the system, CLDMV’s back-end is segregated to many systems to prevent hacking. While data can be retrieved from the control panel anything which has to change the system will always be done through our set of sub-systems to insure stability and security.

Also it’s important to note there was a brief downtime of FTP log in and email receiving on 2014/05/31 at approx 5pm PST to 5:30pm PST. This was due to a mass restructuring of the back-end in order to support the new changes to come.

Log Parser V2

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Prior to version 2 of he log parser the logs were simply dumped into the database for the past 60 days every hour. It was planned that Users could view these logs instantly through a control panel. But unless you really knew what you were looking at this data was sort of useless.

So we came up with V2 of the Log Parser. This parser parses errors and website access into tables which gives a lot more information about the logs. For example I can pull up a number of how many 404 errors happened on any site hosted with CLDMV on any day in the past 60 days. As well as any redirect. If I want to view all the 404 or redirects I can do so. This functionality will be included in the control panel asap.

Why did we do this?

Simple answer really. Analytics services can provide you with how many visits your site gets and a ton of data about this. However they only work on pages where their code is present. Since we can track on the server level we can provide a lot more data. This data helps website owners make critical decisions and code fixes where they see trends in their software.

“Why am I not being indexed by [insert name of search engine]?”

We hear this question quite often. Simply put we do not control how search engines index websites. But we can show you (now) that your site is being crawled by their bots. V2 of the log parser is also logs if the visit was a bot or not.

To show an example:

domainyearmonthdaybot_visitsbot_unique_visitsvisitsunique_visitsfourohfoursredirects
blog.cldmv.net201452720330500

The above results show this site’s basic stats for 2014-5-27. Visits and Unique visits are overall. So all we have to due to find human visits is subtract the bot visits from those numbers.

yearmonthdaydomaintimestampipreal_ipsslbotajaxresourceurlresponse_codevisitrefererbytesgzip_ratiolog_entryuser_agentrequest_typerequest_versionremote_user
2014528example.com140124881166.249.73.71110php/exampleurl.php30213166.249.73.71 - - [28/May/2014:03:46:51 +0000] "GET /exampleurl.php HTTP/1.1" 302 31 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" "-" "-" "https" "-"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)GETHTTP/1.1

Above is an example of all the data available through our Log Parse V2.

Basic Control Panel and Three of the Five Themes Completed

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Earlier this week we rolled out the basic control panel. At this point there isn’t much. Pretty much just displays current bans on the server and invoice data.

Three of the five themes (Default, Orange, Light) have been completed. Blue and Dark are still to come. As well as additional features inside the control panel and a better look inside there.

Some things to come are also domain name management and SSL management. These are two services which we plan to provide on top of the hosting and email services we currently provide.

Developer Frustration on CLDMV

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Recently I’ve been putting a lot of time into development of the control panel. Development of the control panel had been hindered though by one system that makes the sites on CLDMV’s network run faster.

OPCache was the problem. This module of PHP cache’s the results of the compiled PHP code and then serves that up if there is a cache rather than re-compiling the PHP code again. Seems rather simple and it was. For future reference for any developer working on a site in CLDMV’s network. All you have to do is add the below snippet of code to the first file that is being called to disable the cache during development stages.

 

Updates to Web Server

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There was a bug affecting a few clients where they could not delete files in the root of their html folders. This has been fixed. I also have a process running every day now to ensure this doesn’t happen again. The following files will server up a default file if they are not found in the html root folder:

  • robots.txt
  • favicon.ico
  • favicon.png

The default robots.txt only had one rule which is to tell all bots to limit their crawl rate to 1 page per second. Any client can place their own custom robots.txt or favicon.ico in their html root and that file will be served up instead. Some additional cleanup and security was done to the FTP service. Namely when you log into the FTP, clients will only see folders which you can actually do stuff in now. Some of which are just backup or log folders which clients can only (most of them) download the files.

DNS Mail Settings

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While most people never have an issue with their emails. One of the most basic ways to help prevent being black listed and prevent spam from being spoofed from your domain name is to set up SPF records.

Here is http://cldmv.net/ SPF record:

We’ll go over what each of the portions mean now.

v=spf1

This specifies what version the SPF is. Currently the only version supported is spf1.

mx

Specifies that email originating from MX records of the domain name may send email as well.

ptr

Allows any sub domain of the domain to send out email. This can be spoofed but not very easily. Generally someone would need to have access to your DNS records to change this. Also if you have an A Record with “*” pointing to your server this helps prevent this as well.

include:cldmv.net

Specifies that any domain ending in cldmv.net may send email for the domain as well. Generally this would be for your hosting provider to determine based upon their setup.

-all

Notice the negative sign. It tells servers which follow SPF to reject all emails which do not meet the previously set rules.

Anyone hosting email with CLDMV should set their MX record to mx.cldmv.net as well as add the following txt record in order to insure emails are sent and recieved following SPF.