Shared hosting insecurity, core dumps, and troubled disk usage

It always amazed me how some of the sysads of these servers are obsessed with security but fail to see the other side of the picture.

The shared hosting account that I have, a reseller account by the way, won’t let you run normal things in PHP because of their false idea of security. The system uses the infamous CPanel setup as paranoid, when your web app use a fair amount of CPU, your site will be shut off.

Add this to httpd.conf

    RLimitMEM 295490218
    RLimitCPU 240

The funny thing is, they forget to turn off the Core Dump and this will mess the system by filling it with files that only the root can delete. This will give you erros in Disk Usage at CPanel, saying that you are using a huge (GB) space and it is only displaying a smaller (MB) space usage.

So please send the core dump in the void or at least turn them off

$ ulimit -c 0

For the users who have these sysads who don’t listen, instead of sending them to /dev/null together with the core dumps, you can create a script to delete these core dumps and put them on schedule using cron.

From here:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
 
    ## SPECIFY THE PATH TO THE DIRECTORY
    ## NOTE: NO TRAILING SLASH "/"
 
    $dir = "/home/PATHTOYOUR/public_html/phpBB3" ;
 
    ## OPEN AND READ THE DIRECTORY
 
    opendir (DIR, "$dir/");
    @FILES = grep(/^core/,readdir(DIR));
    closedir (DIR);
 
    ## DELETE THE CORE.* FILES
 
    foreach $FILES (@FILES) {
             unlink("$dir/$FILES");
       }

Save as delcore.pl

    15 * * * * /home/PATHTOYOUR/public_html/delcore.pl

Some of them are just clueless when I ask them to delete the core dumps for me. One has even ask me if he can delete the core*.php files in the Smarty library. Geez, what a day.

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