Month: July 2009

AmazonAPISigning.com

Amazon Associate Web Services will start requiring API Requests to contain a cryptographic signature on August 15th. Any website that uses their Product API’s will need to be modified to correctly sign the requests using their Secret Key.

I’ve just created AmazonAPISigning.com which is a website that offers services to help in making the transition to the signed requests. Specifically, it offers a programming service to modify websites code to implement the required changes. It also offers a free API Signing service for those websites that aren’t able to implement the signatures within their own code for whatever reason. The signing service is specifically intended for widgets and tools that are implemented completely via JavaScript, and thus aren’t able to keep their private key hidden from the Javascript Source code.

The signing service may also serve as a really quick solution for webmasters to be able to start signing requests. Their website code simply needs to change the hostname used in the Amazon API requests, and the service will start calculating the signatures on their behalf.

ProFTPd allows multipled DefaultRoot lines for flexible chrooting

The ProFTPd documentation gives good examples of how to use the DefaultRoot directive to chroot users to a specific directory.

A customer today wanted to have different chroot directories for different groups of users. The documentation didn’t mention if it was okay to include multiple DefaultRoot lines. After some experimenting, I can verify that it is allowed and works well.

I used something like this in /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

DefaultRoot                     ~ jailed
DefaultRoot                     ~/../.. othergroup

Users in the group ‘jailed’ are chrooted to their own home directory immediately upon logging in. Users in the ‘othergroup’ are chrooted two levels up from their home directory. If you want to get really specific, each user generally has a group of their own, so you can effectively do this a the user-level as well.