Muhammad Yousuf Khan wrote:
Unfortunately, what I shared is about all I know on the topic. Most of my hardening of Wordpress and Apache was on-the-fly, in response to a botnet attack. I did some googling and searching the WordPress plug-in site to find the plug-ins that I use, played with the settings a bit just to get things working, nothing orderly or that I could share as a best practice. For Apache, I just started in the config file and reducing max_ settings until I reached a level where I wasn't having to restart Apache every few minutes, or rebooting the machine. Unfortunately, the Wordpress site still becomes unreachable at times (when under attack), and the site runs slow at other times (limited number of concurrent accesses), but at least it doesn't take down the entire server - which is a good thing as the Wordpress site is a sideline, the server is really for mail and list processing.NOTE: These help, but if you end up on the attacking end of a distributed bot attack, it's likely that your Apache server will get hosed -- at times, I've had to tune Apache (number of concurrent processes, number of concurrent queries), to keep our server from getting so overloaded that it crashes.Thank for sharing every bit of information. yes i do want to tweak Apache concurrent connection and other settings. is there any formula to do this. would you like to share your thoughts on this.
I did come across some references to software that could dynamically tune IP chains, based on wordpress level attacks -- to block IP addresses earlier in the processing chain, and I expect one could push that back to an external firewall -- but I never went all that far in exploring these. (If you end up doing so, please report back!).
Happy Tuning, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra