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PolicyKit security hole
A security problem was recently announced that affects the linux distributions that we support. This is being called “PwnKit” (a.k.a. CVE-2021-4034). Most distributions have provided updates, so now is a good time to check and load outstanding OS security updates for your VPS, using apt for Debian and Ubuntu and yum for CentOS 7 and…
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CentOS Stream, RockyLinux and Alma Linux
Recently CentOS8 reached its supported end-of-life for security updates. For a number of reasons there will effectively be no more stable releases of CentOS 8 or later. Instead developers are being encouraged to look at CentOS Stream as a future proof option for elX based platforms. This is quite similar to how Gentoo and more…
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Community group discounts: RimuHosting launches its ‘being useful’ initiative
The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all. Leo Rosten RimuHosting is an employee owned business. We have been helping customers with their websites and hosting needs since 2003. Our business is a collection of…
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SMTP, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, TLS
Did you know anyone can send an email impersonating your email address? Back in 1971 when ’email’ was invented and later when it was connected to the Internet both email users knew each other. Since then spammers and other bad actors started to abuse this ‘feature’. And since then some new mechanisms have been added…
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Centos announce Centos 8 retirement
Centos have announced that their RHEL8-based distro Centos8 will no longer be supported from December 2021. This affects customers running Centos 8. It also affects customers running older Centos versions that are thinking updating to a newer distro. There are many alternatives to consider. To mention a few: Centos 7. With support until 2024. RimuHosting…
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Distro upgrade as a service
For several years we have worked with customers to upgrade dozens of servers (primarily Debian and Ubuntu) from old (sometimes ancient) distro versions to the latest, stable versions. We are now offering this distro upgrade as a service. The upgrade steps are as follows: We collect systems information to ensure your setup is updatable (e.g.…
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VM backup and download
The following code snippet uses our https://github.com/pbkwee/s2i project to let you create a backup image of a Linux server, encrypt it, and then make it available for download (or transfer it directly to a remote server). s2i requires PHP, and can make use of PHP’s built in HTTP server. You will need sufficient disk space…
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Centos8 + Apache + Tomcat + LetsEncrypt Setup
A popular setup for Tomcat is to run it as a backend behind Apache. This lets you use Apache for some websites and URLs and Tomcat for others (while keeping the same IP address and port). Another common requirement is to have a valid SSL certificate. This HOWTO describes that setup. The HOWTO is for…
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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS released
The latest long term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu is now available for new installs. Ubuntu 20.04, also known as “Focal Fossa” can be ordered at https://rimuhosting.com/order/v2orderstart.jsp. It’s also an option to consider if you reinstall an existing VPS. The official release notes for this release are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes and will be be upstream…
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Unknown Password Change – diagnostics
Often numerous people have access to an account, developers, owners, system administrators. Occasionally they do things, they maybe shouldn’t – like changing the password – leaving all other people in the loop out. When this happens its always good to make sure that you know who changed that password – because if it was not…