We see lots of different problems every day as Liz noted the other day. It’s really quite varied work that we do and you can go from resetting a password one minute to setting up load balanced proxy servers the next. There’s always a fun and challenging problem right around the corner. The most important…
We recieved the following email this morning which may be a problem from time to time with other users, so i thought I would share this. Subject: Seg faults on apache mysql and a couple of other less import programs. Probably need a fresh install. Message: Hi I have a serious problem with my VPS…
This is something we see time and time again. It is fair to say, unless you have had a bit of experience with it, can be a bit confusing. So here is a breakdown of the domain name components.. Registrar This is the business you pay a yearly fee to register your domain name. i.e.…
I notice that we seem to have waves of support in various ways. One day we will start our shift and be totally overloaded the entire day, so busy that we end up doing a little extra after hours (posting this blog whilst cooking dinner today!). Other days its pretty dull so we play table…
It sucks getting hacked Every now and then servers get hacked. Often because of an exploitable webapp, or because (most commonly) a weak, easily guessable password was used on a well known user account (like ‘root’ or ‘info’ or ‘test’). Once hackers gain access they often install some kind of malware. e.g. something that goes…
I thought a useful addition to our blog might be a running series of handy scripts. Just for the sake of things (and because I couldn’t find a better title), I’m calling the series “David’s Handy Scripts”. I’ll get this show on the road with a quick script I put together to track 2 things…
We had a customer email in after updating to Jaunty recently. They said the following Hi guys, I upgraded my VPS a little while back to Ubuntu Jaunty (because I was several versions out of date and the apt repositories had gone away.) I never actually rebooted the machine afterwards though because it wasn’t a…
I’ve seen this problem a few times, people having trouble getting the permissions right for websites. Heres a quick fix that will sort you in most cases For directories run find /path/to/domain/public_html/ -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755 Files run this one find /path/to/domain/public_html/ -type f | xargs chmod 644 Make sure you…
Recently we have had a few support requests come through from people who are new to Linux, and are unsure how to maintain a server at all. Package Management If your Linux distro is RedHat based (ie Centos, , then you will be using yum and RPM. RPM is for doing individual package manipulation (installing,…
I had high hopes for netbooks bringing about an increased mindshare for Linux for ordinary users. This didn’t quite pan out unfortunately and it’s nigh impossible to find a Linux netbook at a brick and mortar store these days. Users loved the low price and mobility of a netbook, but (seemingly) didn’t appreciate the lack…