December 2011 Newsletter

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Peter Bryant

Welcome to the latest RimuHosting newsletter.

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.

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Silverstripe CMS on Standing Cloud webinar Tue Dec 13 1300 PST

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Peter Bryant

Join Standing Cloud and Peter from RimuHosting at Tue, Dec 13, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PST for a webinar that demonstrates Standing Clouds one-click app deployment and management (to RimuHosting servers).

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/

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Fixing broken permissions or ownership

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Liz Quilty

People are not perfect, not even the staff here. Perfection is not required to be a sysadmin we found, just some good shell scripts to fix things when you break them accidentally.

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.

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Using swap within a VPS

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Liz Quilty

In a virtual environment, disk io can be about the most expensive operation there is. And swap (virtual memory) depends on that heavily. By default we configure a small swap partition for each VPS server so conditions where memory is exhausted can be detected more consistently, Continue reading →

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Easy application hosting using StandingCloud and RimuHosting

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Peter Bryant

Imagine being able to configure a server, pre-setup and ready to run your favorite webapp, with a push of a button.  Need a bug tracking system?  Just hit a button, and wait a minute, then log into your own Bugzilla app.  No sysadmin skills required.  No wondering about best practices or security upgrades.

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.

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Checking a potentially hacked machine and reinstalling packages when you break things

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Liz Quilty

Sometimes you may see something odd go past in the logs, on the screen, or something might just seem a bit 'off' somehow. Its a good idea when this happens to just double check that things are as they should be, verify packages, binaries, check logs etc

Here are a few things i find helpful when doing this

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VPS-on-dedicated server hosting v2.0

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Peter Bryant

Today RimuHosting introduce our version 2.0 of our VPS-on-dedicated server hosting.  With this upgrade you get:

  • Instant dedicated server setups.
  • Great discounts on selected dedicated servers (starting at $120/m).
  • The power of dedicated servers with the convenience of cloud virtualization.
  • Dedicated server hosting billed by the minute or hour or day or month.

VPS-on-dedicated-server hosting is a hybrid VPS/dedicated server.  You get the power of a dedicated server.  For example, you do not share your disk IO or CPU with any other users.

But you also get the convenience of a VPS.  For example, you get browser-based access to disk image snapshots, restores, reboots, kernel selectors, install server reinstalls.

In June 2006 RimuHosting was the first Linux hosting company to offer this Xen-based VPS-on-dedicated server hosting.

Today we continue that innovation by updating our Launchtime ordering system so that you can order a VPS-on-dedicated server.   Simply select the 'VPS on your own dedicated server' option, then choose one of our pre-setup dedicated servers.

We have pre-setup dedicated servers as VPS hosts.  We currently have servers listed from $120/m Core2 quad core servers up to $200/m dual CPU Xeons with 8GB of memory.  And we will be adding a mix of servers into that offering over time.  Look for some great one-off dedicated server specials.

You choose your distro and control panel as normal.  If you're an existing customer your setup can run immediately.  If you are a new customer we will sanity check your order and typically you'll have the server setup in 30 minutes.

Servers ordered qualify for our per-minute pricing.  So you can grab a dedicated server, use it for an hour or day or week or two.  Then shut it down.  You will get a pro-rated credit that applies against any future invoices.

For more information on our VPS-on-dedicated server hosting see http://rimuhosting.com/knowledgebase/rimuhosting/vps-setup-on-dedicated-servers

To order a see our VPS-on-dedicated pricing and order your next dedicated server go to http://rimuhosting.com/order/vps-on-dedicated.jsp.

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DigiNotar and SSL certificates

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Glenn Enright

Great news! We were pretty sure, but a recent notification from our certificate supplier told us that none of the certificates ordered on behalf of our customers are signed by DigiNotar.

For those of you not aware, DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority who provided signed SSL Certificates against their own trust chain. Which was recognized by all major browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera) and therefore enhanced the security and browsing experience of many SSL secured sites.

In July 2011– An internal audit discovered an intrusion within DigiNotar’s CA infrastructure indicating a compromise of their cryptographic keys. The breach of these keys resulted in the fraudulent issuance of public key certificates to a several dozen domains including the domain Google.com. Shortly after the incident, DigiNotar revoked all of the certificates in question, conducted an additional external security audit and then attempted to revoke outstanding certificates that were affected.

You can read full details from their official press release

However as analysis continued and the evident scale of the problem increased, many that used DigiNotar as a top level signing CA felt that chain was no longer trustworthy. For those with certificates signed by them this turned into a significant issue  as software developers for the major browsers completely revoked the top level certificate in their browsers, requiring them to purchase new certificates from alternate agencies.

Why is this important to you?

  • This breach highlights the need to be vigilant about your server security
  • SSL enable sites remain one of the most important methods securing browser connections and creating trust to site visitors.
  • You can rest assured that the SSL certificates we provide are secure

If you would like to know more about the SSL certificate options we provide please take a look at our secure SSL Certificate order page, or pop in an email to us directly at support@rimuhosting.com with details on what you would like to know.

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Why is your server sending spam? why does it keep crashing with high load?

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Liz Quilty

We get asked these questions regularly, and 9 out of 10 times it may be because your server may have been hacked, either on a user level, web application, or more.

Here are some ways to quickly check for the most common things we see , and some of the processes we go through to find the culprits

Continue reading →

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Could not perform immediate configuration on already unpacked ‘util-linux’.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Liz Quilty

Today we had a customer who had somehow broken his apt package manager doing an upgrade from the looks. I googled and found the same error in many places, most resorting to reinstalling or purging the package to clear it, or reinstall.
The error looked like this

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