I have now added putting the site into maintenance mode whilst upgrading. This just involves adding a .maintenance in the document root.

It pays to check each site after the upgrade to make sure plugins all worked (and upgrade plugins before the upgrade works also!)

Let me know if you have any bugs at all, or any problems.

Here’s your script to upgrade them all.

wget http://b.ri.mu/files/wordpress-upgrade-3.3.1.sh
bash wordpress-upgrade-3.3.1.sh

MD5
e365a7fa4b69b3ad52e75b4175c1539a wordpress-upgrade-3.3.1.sh

SHA1
653d1a95a89cfc4be3253af96ef915ba3615ad18 wordpress-upgrade-3.3.1.sh

If you find any bugs or problems, just let me know at liz at rimuhosting dot com

2 Parts Magic is team of web programmers.  Based here in the Cambridge RimuHosting offices.  They write browser based web applications for start-ups and successful Internet-based businesses.  So you can use their services to implement your rich internet applications.  Typically forms or pages using things like Ajax, Javascript, HTML5 on the client side.  Applications that require a 'server side' that makes use of databases and knows about users and billing and things like complex ordering systems.  Applications that need things like REST-ful APIs.

Why do this?  First we think there is a need.  Our customers ask whether we provide programming services, or if we can refer them to someone who does.

Also, our development team here is getting pretty darn good at quickly building really useful and usable web applications.

So far the 2 Parts Magic team has worked on our own internal ventures:  Pingability website monitoring, Zonomi managed DNS, Bakop's backup service, the 25Mail.st email hosting, et al.  Plus our unique InboxHarmony collaborative email client.

We are continuing to develop our own new ventures (we've just started work on a cool new project, stay tuned) and we're constantly improving our current applications.

But now the 2 Parts Magic developers are also available to turn your idea for a new software-as-a-service application into a production ready, highly usable, efficient web app.

Visit http://2partsmagic.com to find out how we work and how easy it is to get your idea off the ground.

I have now added putting the site into maintenance mode whilst upgrading. This just involves adding a .maintenance in the document root.

It pays to check each site after the upgrade to make sure plugins all worked (and upgrade plugins before the upgrade works also!)

Let me know if you have any bugs at all, or any problems.

Here’s your script to upgrade them all.

wget http://b.ri.mu/files/wordpress-upgrade-3.3.sh
bash wordpress-upgrade-3.3.sh

MD5
a976aca14faf744f6271f8b8de9f59cb wordpress-upgrade-3.3.sh

SHA1
cdcda9912cd9e0063cd3d0930cd55b07ae2bda96 wordpress-upgrade-3.3.sh

If you find any bugs or problems, just let me know at liz at rimuhosting dot com

We will try to keep you posted on some of the our key news since the last newsletter back in April (http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2011/04/19/newsletter-2011-04/)

Launching 2 Parts Magic software development services

RimuHosting's latest venture is a team of web application developers-for-hire. 2 Parts Magic (http://2partsmagic.com) builds made-to-order web application software.  So if you are launching a new web service, or need a billing or user registration, or want a dynamic, easy-to-use ordering system consider working with the 2 Parts Magic team.

The 2 Parts Magic team are the same developers that have worked on RimuHosting ventures like http://pingability.com; http://zonomi.com and http://inboxharmony.com

The 2 Parts Magic team's software development toolbox includes server-side technologies like Java, JSP, MySQL, REST-ful APIs and on the client-side we use Javascript, Ajax, HTML5 and CSS3.  Their specialty is building easy-to-use, dynamic web pages.

If you are a web developer specializing more in design and static content, then the 2 Parts Magic team can help by building the more complex and dynamic parts of your client's website.

If you are about to be building a new web application or know someone who will be, then have them contact the 2 Parts Magic team at http://2partsmagic.com

One click webapp deployments with Standing Cloud

RimuHosting recently teamed up with StandingCloud to enable website owners to perform browser-based, one click-click webapp deployments to cloud servers (running on RimuHosting hardware).

This lets you easily deploy content management systems (like Silverstripe and WordPress). Or to run a wide range of other software like bug, issue and project management webapps. Or eCommerce sites; discussion forums or even phone systems (like OpenVBX).

For details see http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2011/11/07/standing-cloud/

Discounted dedicated servers; Instant setups

RimuHosting has launched a range of cut-price dedicated servers. Servers are individually speced and priced. The stock will vary from day to day. Current examples include host366 a USD 120/m Core 2 server with 4GB of memory; and host781 a USD 170/m E5506 Xeon with 6GB of memory and 250GB of RAID1 storage.

The servers are all available for instant setup. They all come with features such as regular snapshot backups; browser-based re-installs, restores, reboots and console access.

As always, the RimuHosting sysadmin team are more than happy to help install and configure the applications and services you need on the server.

For more information about the servers see http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2011/09/30/vps-on-dedicated-server-hosting/ and to order a server go to http://launchtimevps.com/order/vps-on-dedicated.jsp

Ever-improving VPS resources

As our VPS host servers get more and more powerful we are able to offer better and better resources on our VPS plans.

If you have not checked out our VPS pricing recently see http://launchtimevps.com or http://launchtimevps.com/order/vpspricing.jsp .  It has never been a better time to ditch your shared web hosting and get setup with your very own server.

If you already have a server with us then check every few months for a free upgrade at http://rimuhosting.com/cp/vps/upgrade.jsp

Quick news

Our DNS API has been extended see: http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2011/08/16/wildcard-dns-queries/

Our new http://25mail.st managed email service is now providing email services for over 200 users.  Make the most of your own domain name and come join them using http://25mail.st as your new email provider.

Our http://launchtimevps.com servers now have new Linux 3.0 kernels available, as well as recent distros like Centos 6 and Ubuntu 11.10

We have pushed out some great new features to our http://inboxharmony.com collaborative email client. Managing multiple emails and attachments has just gotten easier. If your business provides support via email then you need to check out http://inboxharmony.com

And that is our news for this newsletter.

Tell your friends how we can remove the hassle from their hosting

If you enjoy your RimuHosting hosting service then please think of a friend or colleague that could do with their having their own Linux server then let them know about us!  We appreciate the referrals.

And if you happen to blog about us then remember you can always use our affiliate referral scheme to earn yourself hosting credits, see http://rimuhosting.com/affiliate/about

2011 has been a busy year for us.  We know many of our customers are struggling in the current economy.  So we are constantly trying to make it easier and more hassle free to host and run their website.  As well as always striving to provide great value to our customers.  If you can think of any way we can help provide you a better service, please let us know.

Our best wishes to you for a prosperous 2012 from the team at RimuHosting!

We will be giving a demo using Silverstripe as our target app.  And the webinar will be followed by a Q&A session.

You can reserve your spot in the webinar now at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/787963142

See you at the webinar!

For more information about the Standing Cloud/RimuHosting integration see http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2011/11/07/standing-cloud/

One of the more common accidents are chown or chmod ones, especially the ones done as root from / . Its easy to accidentally chown someuser:someuser * and forget you are not /home/someuser but in /, and equally easy to find / -type f -exec xargs chmod 600 or similar (instead of find ./  ... ) . Here's how we fix it.

Since most of our customers run backups (its automated ever week unless you requested disabled them ), you can fix it fairly easily. In fact this will also work if you mounted using sshfs on another server also.

So, first mount the old backup image with (see http://youtu.be/TycDqUQw-mE ) the right permissions, somewhere like /mnt is good . If you do not have backups, but another server same distro and similar files, then use sshfs and mount it.

Now put this in a file on the server; sh fix_perms.sh , or copy paste everything other than the first line into your terminal (but make sure you change the first couple config lines to match your mounts)

#!/bin/bash
ORIGIN="/mnt"
ROOTFS="/"
 
find ${ORIGIN} | sed s@"${ORIGIN}"@@ | while read FFILE 
do
echo working with "${ORIGIN}${FFILE}"
UIDGID=$(stat -c "%u:%g" "${ORIGIN}${FFILE}")
CHMOD=$(stat -c "%a" "${ORIGIN}${FFILE}")
chown ${UIDGID} "${ROOTFS}${FFILE}"
chmod ${CHMOD} "${ROOTFS}${FFILE}"
done

If you want to list the permissions on one server, then copy them to the other without sshfs you can modify it to something similar to this. This should be run on the GOOD server that does NOT need fixing . It outputs the commands to a file that gets copied to the broken one to have run on it.

#!/bin/bash
ORIGIN="/mnt"
ROOTFS="/"
 
rm -f filepermfix.sh
touch filepermfix.sh
 
find ${ORIGIN} | sed s@"${ORIGIN}"@@ | while read FFILE 
do
echo working with "${ORIGIN}${FFILE}"
UIDGID=$(stat -c "%u:%g" "${ORIGIN}${FFILE}")
CHMOD=$(stat -c "%a" "${ORIGIN}${FFILE}")
echo chown ${UIDGID} "${ROOTFS}${FFILE}" >>filepermfix.sh
echo chmod ${CHMOD} "${ROOTFS}${FFILE}" >>filepermfix.sh
done
echo copy off the filepermfix.sh and run it on the remote machine 'sh filepermfix.sh'

This should also work if you just wanted to clone permissions on branches of code or other similar things for any reason.

If you run Debian and broke packages you can use the following to reinstall them
apt-get install --reinstall --force -y $(dpkg --get-selections | grep install | grep -v deinstall )

Centos has a fix permissions options you can run on all installed software like this
for i in `rpm -qa`;do rpm --setperms $i;done

Swapfiles (manually created file based swap) are not recommended on our VPS servers since they often degrade the performance of your service when actively used.

Our hosts are all monitored in case load on different subsystems are causing issues. And we might send you an alert if your swap space is being used a lot since that often indicates problems with the VPS. In some cases we might limit that usage to prevent other customers on the same host from being affected.

If your server is consistently using swap space, and you have tuned resource usage by your services as much as possible, we highly recommend adding more RAM. You can do that at any time via our handy resource change tool

To check if your server is swapping you can use the free command. In the following example you can see that a small amount of swap space has been used on the third line, which is ok in this case.

~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3962       3694        267          0        297       1442
-/+ buffers/cache:       1953       2008
Swap:          128          4        124

One way to help the VPS be less likely to prefer swap space is to tweak the swappiness kernel parameter. As the root user you can temporarily set that to a value between 0 and 100 with the following command (lower values means less likely to swap, default is 60):

echo 30 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

You can make that permanent by adding the parameter to the end of the /etc/sysctl.conf like the following:

vm.swappiness = 30

Any changes to the sysctl.conf file can be loaded by rebooting your VPS, or more nicely with:

sysctl -f /etc/sysctl.conf

StandingCloud are making this possible.  They currently have 101 web applications that can be deployed and managed on a cloud server with a push of a button.  They automate the sysadmin tasks required to install and manage these applications, and use 3rd party cloud hosts to provide the hosting platform.

StandingCloud lists the available webapps at http://www.standingcloud.com/network and they include Bugzilla, Coppermine, DokuWiki, Drupal, GeoServer, Joomla, Mambo, Moodle, OpenVBX, osCommerce, osTicket, Redmine, Silverstripe, WordPress and Alfresco among others.

As of 1 November RimuHosting is now one of the supported cloud hosting providers.

StandingCloud can operate a couple of ways.  They can either provide the hosting (using RimuHosting) and charge you directly for the hosting service.  Or you can plug in your RimuHosting API key and then there is no StandingCloud charge for the hosting part of the service (the server is billed directly on your RimuHosting account).  In the latter case StandingCloud will charge a lower monthly fee for providing the application management.

It is pretty simple to plug in your RimuHosting API keys:

And after you have created an instance of a hosted application it appears in your StandingCloud control panel:

If you happen to be an open source- or commercial application-developer then StandingCloud may be a great way for you to offer your users an easy installation and hosting option.

If you would like your users to be hosted on a RimuHosting server then just send them through to our StandingCloud landing URL at http://www.standingcloud.com/poweredby/rimuhosting

StandingCloud offer free trials so it is easy to 'kick the tyres' and get a feel for how it works.  If you like what you see, do let us know: the good folks at StandingCloud are looking to feature a RimuHosting user in an upcoming web article.

Here are a few things i find helpful when doing this

Install something like rkhunter or chkrootkit, run it regularly and check the output. These tools are excellent at helping detect oddities that should not be there. I find rkhunter better in that it emails me regularly (every night) and lets me know if there are changes or things happening.

Sometimes the server is not mine (ok, a lot of the time since i work on peoples servers), so these things may not be installed already, and i want to check packages installed are the correct ones, and have not been replaced by a hacker, or some other odd process. I use something like this

For Redhat based systems (Fedora, Centos etc)

apt-get install yum-verify
yum verify-all

For Debian based systems its a little harder, but scriptable

dpkg -l \*|while read s n rest; do if [ "$s" == "ii" ]; then echo $n;
fi; done > ~/tmp.txt
for f in `cat ~/tmp.txt`; do debsums -s -a $f; done

These commands will take some time, and use a fair amount of CPU and disk IO when you run them, so be aware they may slow the VPS/Server down a little.
Also, be aware you may have a fair few false positives, usually on configurations which have changed from the default packages

IF a package appears to be tampered with you can reinstall it like this
Centos/RedHat/Fedora

yum reinstall packagename

Or reinstall all packages

yum reinstall $(yum list installed | awk '{print $1}')

Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get install --reinstall packagename

or reinstall all packages

apt-get install --reinstall $(dpkg --get-selections |grep -v deinstall)

Possibly not such a great idea to reinstall all packages, if its that bad you really should reinstall the server from scratch. Ideally if you have been root exploited in any way you should reinstall from scratch as nothing will be safe (especially your package manager or SSH daemon). The main reason i put these commands here is because they are handy if you break things also

Lastly, it pays to regularly run netstat to check for strange open ports or connections, ps for odd running things, and of course all your logs for things (especially apache error log).