Year: 2010

So the Lib Dems might finally shake things up – I’ve not supported them before, and still dislike many of their policies – but I do feel that were they to get in, there would be an adequate shake up of the establishment in Westminster (PR or something similar would be a good move for a start – I’m increasingly fed up with (I feel) politicians getting ‘safe’ seats and effectively not listening to their constituents).

Unfortunately I suspect the polls will keep remain somewhat level, or Mr Clegg’s honeymoon will end as voters are either disillusioned by the ongoing press attention and we’ll just end up with Labour winning as our First Past the Post system seems to be favouring them for some reason.

At the moment I’m not sure who I’ll vote for; our local replacement Tory couldn’t be arsed to reply to an email I sent which just asked where he stood on DeBill / WhatDeBill etc – which didn’t particularly impress me. I’d expected to effectively get a copy+pasted generic reply saying whatever the party line was, but he couldn’t be bothered with that. Oh, and he also seems incapable of using Twitter/Facebook etc.

Having said that, my local LibDem candidate has figured such things out (website / facebook etc) but judging from what’s fallen through my letter box (and then straight into the recycling box) he is being outspent by the conservative campaign, in a seat where my vote counts for 0.09 of a ‘normal vote’ (clearly some votes are more equal than others?!) I can’t think he can be very optimistic.

Today, I logged into one server to have a rummage and see if I could free up some disk space… on a whim I do an ‘ls’ of /tmp and find a file called ‘att1.txt’. Hmm. Lets take a look – ‘head att1.txt’ gave :

... POST http://....../admin/record_company.php/password_forgotten.php?action=insert
... POST http://..../index.php?main_page=products_all/admin/record_company.php/password_forgotten.php?action=insert

... GET /index.php?main_page=products_all/images/6e072.php?site=http://...../index.php?main_page=products_all/images     /6e072.php

It turns out there was a security update for Zen-cart sometime ago – see http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=130161

Suffice to say the various attackers had left a few files on the filesystem; thanks to ‘find -user www-data’ these were easy to find and remove. Interestingly Zen-Cart suggests you rename the ‘admin’ directory – I wonder how many people don’t (in this case) or do it to e.g. ‘admin.old’ …

*sigh*

Here’s a short python script I must have knocked up some time ago – and totally forgotten – hopefully it’ll be of some use to others….

Purpose: backup all MySQL databases, one in each file with a timestamp on the end. You’ll probably want to have a secondary cron job which does something like :

find /backups/mysql -mtime +5 -print | xargs -r rm

to delete old copies… changing +5 to how ever many days history you wish to have.

Method: Read /etc/mysql/debian.cnf to get login details for MySQL, connect to MySQL and ask it for a list of all databases, go through this list calling mysqldump on each one.

Code:

(Last updated: 2012/10/10 – skip trying to backup the performance_schema).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import ConfigParser
import os
import time

# On Debian, /etc/mysql/debian.cnf contains 'root' a like login and password.
config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read("/etc/mysql/debian.cnf")
username = config.get('client', 'user')
password = config.get('client', 'password')
hostname = config.get('client', 'host')

filestamp = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

# Get a list of databases with :
database_list_command="mysql -u %s -p%s -h %s --silent -N -e 'show databases'" % (username, password, hostname)
for database in os.popen(database_list_command).readlines():
    database = database.strip()
    if database == 'information_schema':
        continue
    if database == 'performance_schema':
        continue
    filename = "/backups/mysql/%s-%s.sql" % (database, filestamp)
    os.popen("mysqldump -u %s -p%s -h %s -e --opt -c %s | gzip -c > %s.gz" % (username, password, hostname, database, filename))