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Admin Tools

#21011 Manually select the server type.

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by user85521 on Tuesday, 23 September 2014 06:36 CDT

user85521
hello

My server works with apache but my host to limit attacks gives it an IIS signature.

Is it possible to have an option to manually select the type of server in order to access all the options, including "Emergency Off-Line Mode" and "Protect your administrator back-end with a password" ...

Thank you in advance

Nicolas

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
No, you can't. What your host is doing is completely wrong and misguided. Hackers don't care about the server signature when trying attacks against your site. The proof is on our own site, which is running on Apache and Joomla!: we get over three dozen attacks every single day directed towards IIS and WordPress. Security through obscurity is as good as no security at all. If your host's idea of security is obscurity you'd better switch hosts a.s.a.p.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

user85521
Server security is more important than that. But would not it be possible to have an option in a future version of admin tools to be able to manually declare a server appache or enable certain options manually as "Emergency Off-Line Mode" and "Protect your administrator back -end with a password "...

Nicolas

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
No, we can't do that. We did something similar to that in previous versions of Admin Tools. We would merely warn you that the server reports itself as being something other than Apache which might not work. People would still try to use these features on IIS and then file a support request asking us why they don't work. The only workaround we could possibly deploy is prevent IIS/NginX users from using those features and warn users of other servers (e.g. lighttpd) that these features might not work.

Moreover, even if we added a switch to let you manually declare your server as Apache, the .htaccess Maker wouldn't work properly as it needs to know the Apache version. There are subtle differences between Apache 1.3, 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4 which call for slightly different implementation of a lot of features. Since your server is lying about itself we can't know which Apache version it is, resulting in a wrong .htaccess file. If we let you define that manually we'd need every single one of our clients to know which Apache version they use, which is practically impossible.

So, we have 99.99% of our clients who can benefit from automatic server type detection and you who can't use our software because your server is misconfigured. Sorry, you are a stark minority, we can't provide for your use case. As I explained the problem is that your host is doing something blatantly wrong. We just can't inflict massive frustration to all of our clients because there's one site on one host whose managers mistake obscurity with security.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

user85521
Thank you for your quick response. I'm going to put the original signature in order to benefit from all the functionalities of Admin Tools.

Good day
Nicolas

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