Category Archives: Online

PCI Compliance – Continued

So after many both my own nmap and openssl and the PCI tests we are finally PCI compliant.

For MediaTemple customers however one thing kept failing the test.

This was the port 8443 which used by Plesk Virtuozo Service and is caused by having the “Offline Management” enabled.

To solve this I asked Mediatemple for help and they gladly disabled the “Offline Management”. This however did not completely solve the issue, since it still left the port open, and since Plesk was still installed it would still overwrite any customization I did to the iptables to block this port, even if I would go though the process of adding it correctly (at least what I could find).

So to solve this I did the following:

I edited the crontab:

crontab -e

and added the block line for iptables:
* * * * * /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8443 -j REJECT

additionally to make sure I did not risk locking myself out I also added a ACCEPT line for my SSH port:
* * * * * /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport MYPORTNUMBER -j ACCEPT

Cron runs this every minute so as soon as Plesk overwrites the iptables rules, the crontab runs and it’s added again.

This solved the issue which failed the PCI compliance test for me.

In theory this should also work with “Offline management” enabled which is going to be my next experiment. Additionally I am going to try adding an exception for my ip into the iptables to se if that works.

For now though we are PCI compliant and the cron will, for now, make sure it stays that way until I find a more permanent solution or Mediatemple updates the Plesk installation.

MediaTemple Grid Service (GS) Experience

Since March 09 I have been hosting my blogs EcoTipsForLife.com and my website move2create.com at MediaTemple.com

I have been using the Grid (GS) service and can report that I haven’t had any outages (that where not my doing of course…) or issues since.

Hosting is reliable, system maintenance is announced well ahead and often scheduled well in advance and customer service is very fast, responsive and helpfull.

All in all, I am a very happy MT customer.

On top of that I am only paying a total of $13.33 a month ($160/year) for their $20 a month Grid Service.

This is because I used the coupon “retailmenot” which takes off 20% of any plan for the life of the plan, and since I paid yearly the discount was quite substantial.

For more info or to order service from MediaTemple click here