Tag Archives: Development

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.

New Development Horizons – Getting into iPhone Dev

Today I enrolled into the iPhone Development Program. Since I have no objective C, C++ or C- knowledge I looked for tools beforehand in order to make the step into development simpler.

I found a couple:

Now the difference between PhoneGap, Titanium and Corona is that both PhoneGap and Titanium are tools to help you write iPhone apps based on html and javascript including many of the popular libraries (prototype, mootools, jquery, etc.) thereby essentially removing the learning curve of iPhone dev for web designers. Also both are free downloads.

Corona on the other hand is a different matter all together. It let’s you write in Lua. Therefore Corona does have a learning curve, but (keep in mind I don’t know enough about iPhone dev to say this with complete certainty ) might provide more advanced development possibilities.

As of now I will start out using PhoneGap, and when things go smoothly and I have the time to mess about with the Corona Trail Download I might even purchase the Corona Package ($99) and use that since the Lua language seems logical and easy to learn.

I’ll post regularly with updates regarding my Dev journey.