Normanski

Optimizing Advertisement and Earnings with OpenX

Friday, March 14th, 2008 | Web Thinkering | No Comments

I found a great tool called OpenX, it’s an open source ad server where you can manage your advertising spot, rotate banners, geo-target ads, track performance, log statistics and so much more.

I have been playing with the settings and experimenting on different combinations of ads that would yield the highest earnings for my website. I was amazed by the significant performance gains on my advertising spot specially when i used geo-targeting.

I also set priorities for ad displays of my advertisers giving higher priorities to those with better CPM rates. My main site has a lot of southeast-asian visitors and many advertisers have stopped serving/paying ads for such traffic. Thus i geo-target ads for SEA visitors to optimize earnings.

The only down-side of implementing openX on my site was the significant increase in the server load, specially when i enabled the GeoIP targeting and the statistics logging. For high traffic sites it is advised to host the openX adserver in another dedicated server or at least a VPS. Running it from a shared hosting will only get you booted out in a few days for overloading the shared server.

Ad serving for the publisher who are serious about making money – OpenX tag line

Installing DenyHosts

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 | Web Thinkering | No Comments

To prevent Dictionary attacks, you can use DenyHosts to stay protected

 

On Ubuntu or debian

apt-get install python wget

apt-get install denyhosts

and go directly to edit the configuration file, if you want to have it from the source, follow to the next step.

tar xvzf DenyHosts-2.6.tar.gz

cd DenyHosts-2.6

python setup.py install

Now, you should configure to fit your needs, first copy the conf file example

cp /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg-dist /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg

Now edit the denyhosts.cfg

pico /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg

make sure you have this two options how your distro of Linux needs

    SECURE_LOG = /var/log/auth.log

    LOCK_FILE = /var/run/denyhosts.pid

The above example is for Debian / Ubuntu, etc.

Here you have how should be for some of other Linux distributions

# Redhat or Fedora Core:
#SECURE_LOG = /var/log/secure
#
# Mandrake, FreeBSD or OpenBSD:
#SECURE_LOG = /var/log/auth.log
#
# SuSE:
#SECURE_LOG = /var/log/messages

Now make it possible for DenyHosts to run as a daemon

cd /usr/share/denyhosts
cp daemon-control-dist daemon-control
pico daemon-control

Make sure this is like your distro needs

###############################################
#### Edit these to suit your configuration ####
###############################################

DENYHOSTS_BIN   = "/usr/bin/denyhosts.py"
DENYHOSTS_LOCK  = "/var/lock/subsys/denyhosts"
DENYHOSTS_CFG   = "/usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg"

PYTHON_BIN      = "/usr/bin/env python"

for Ubuntu / Debian you should change the

###############################################
#### Edit these to suit your configuration ####
###############################################

DENYHOSTS_LOCK  = "/var/lock/subsys/denyhosts.pid"

Make sure the root owns the daemon-control file, and the permissions are 700

chown root:root daemon-control

chmod 700 daemon-control

create the link for the daemon-control script

cd /etc/init.d
ln -s /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control denyhosts
update-rc.d denyhosts defaults
/etc/init.d/denyhosts start

In RedHat Distributions you should do.

cd /etc/init.d
ln -s /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control denyhosts
chkconfig –add denyhosts && chkconfig denyhosts on
service denyhosts start