LCA2019 round up

Posted on February 4, 2019 by Liz Quilty

Every year the staff at Rimu look forward to the latest Linux.conf.au conference. Some of us go in person, some watch online, but we all love it, and love to catch up with whats going on.

This year it was in Christchurch and Juan and I (Liz) went down to attend in person.

CULTURE

Christchurch was amazing, Juan took the time to race about on a Lime Scooter, and we all caught up with old regular LCA attendees.

Spent a fair amount of time in the common rooms where we had soldaring, RaspberryPis, DonkeyCars, and a TV hooked up to a laptop playing JackBox Games.

Spent one evening making some Ear rings with flashing LEDs for a teenage girl, explaining basic soldering, and electronics which was great.


The Penguin dinner was at The Airforce Museum and was amazing. We were able to walk around the museum, then sit down in a large clear area to eat food.

The professional delegates dinner was held at the Canterbury Uni where LCA itself was held, and was less interesting (though the food was good)

Manage to catch up with all the usual LCA attendees, including Linus Torvalds, Bdale Garbee, Dirk Hohndel, and other open source/linux "celebs"

If you ever happen to be at an LCA and see Linus or Dirk, and want to approach them, by all means do. Freindly guys! If you need a conversation starter, ask if they have been diving yet and where abouts (they usually go diving before/after LCA in the pacific Islands or Aussie).

Met this guy who had a 'hug badge' which rated your hug, and sent a tweet out when you hugged him! Most well hugged man at LCA i imagine!


Here are a few random other Photos of Christchurch, the room, and some amusing/cool things of note.

TALKS

I prefer a talk that i can walk away from having learnt something (tutorials) or been inspired to try something new. Some of the key stand out talks for me were the following.'

The Garden bot (Keynote)

How to make your own PCB boards (design and prototype)

Hacking Insulin pumps with open source (Keynote)

I particularly liked the opensource superhumans where Jon Oxer explains his work with those less able bodied people

As a side note, i also took part in the openhardware miniconf Jon took, and we built a DonkeyCar

I decided to learn how to program in Lua/Love2d which was actually easy and fun way to get into game development (i sometimes teach kids in my spare time)

I missed this talk in person, but have seen it before, and its a fantastic talk i though worth looking at

There were plenty of other talks i went to, you can view the entire conference at https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2019

One of the main organizers of LCA2019 owns this awesome car that runs a raspberry pi, and oodles of LEDs etc

Over all, i can happily say it was yet another sucessful LCA, and totally worth going to. Can't wait till next year!

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Your Let’s Encrypt client used ACME TLS-SNI-01 domain validation to issue

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Liz Quilty

Are you seeing this message about your server ?

Action may be required to prevent your Let's Encrypt certificate renewals
from breaking.

If you already received a similar e-mail, this one contains updated
information.

Your Let's Encrypt client used ACME TLS-SNI-01 domain validation to issue
a certificate in the past 60 days

This is an issue caused by the certbot binary being out of date. We are seeing it on a few systems, and it seems there is an easy fix for it!

Debian stretch:
Add backports by adding a line into /etc/apt/sources.list like this
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports

Then apt-get update ; apt-get install certbot python-certbot-apache -t stretch-backports

Anything else you will need to download the binary for as per https://certbot.eff.org/

If you get stuck doing any of this, pop in a support ticket and we can help out.

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Solve Letsencrypt (including Certbot) problems caused by rogue .htaccess files

Posted on November 29, 2018 by Alex

At RimuHosting we're enthusiastic about how Let's Encrypt gives website owners a great way to secure their websites. And certbot is the tool we usually recommend to get a Let's Encrypt certificate. We find it's easy to use and works well on recent distributions.

However, sometimes issuing or renewing a certificate fails. A common reason is that certbot cannot complete the authentication requirements with the Let's Encrypt servers.

If you run in to this type of problem when getting a certificate we are happy to fix it for you.  Lodge an SSL Cert ticket at https://rimuhosting.com/ticket/startticket.jsp, and we'll get your certificate sorted and website secured quickly.  If you'd rather tackle it yourself, read on to find how to fix one possible cause of this problem. Continue reading →

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New Zealand-Based RimuHosting — Striving to Help Tech-Savvy Businesses Across the Globe Put Down Their Roots for Strong Online Growth

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Peter Bryant

At RimuHosting it is our mission to help take the hassle out of our customer's hosting.

In a recent Hosting Advice article Christine Preusler touches on our 24x7 support, our global network of data centres and our customer focussed attention to detail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A top-10 website hosting review focuses on our diverse network of data centers, our support for customers with complex hosting needs, and our VM on dedicated hosting.

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Certbot/Letsencrypt with Apache and Tomcat using proxypass

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Liz Quilty

LetsEncrypt/Certbot is a wonderful cheap way to have an SSL cert to secure things. It works out of the box and no issues for the most part until you have things like proxy pass or other things.

The fix is fairly easy however, and this works well in particular with those running tomcat behind apache

Create a config for letsencrypt in say /etc/httpd/conf/letencrypt.conf or /etc/apache/ that looks something like this

Continue reading →

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Debian Stretch and old installs

Posted on June 5, 2018 by Glenn Enright

openlogo-nd-100We have had Debian 9 images available since shortly after it became available. But missed announcing it. So here it is, Debian 9 is code named "Stretch" and is available as a setup option on all our plans.

As with other newer images, there is only a 64 bit image for new setups or re-installs. Most customers are now ordering 64 bit distros.  And some distros only come in a 64 bit flavor now. Customers with an existing 32bit install also have the option to crossgrade to a 64bit install in place.

The Stretch install is compact but comes with MySQL and Apache out of the box, along with a bunch of other great tools preinstalled to help you get up and running faster. Most of the changes from Jessie are incremental, but there are a few highlights from the release notes:

  • Gcc version jumps from 4.7 to 6.3
  • PHP version 7.0 is now installed by default, bringing a ton of performance improvements, especially for cpu and memory usage
  • Mariadb is now the default mysql variant

If you're wishing to upgrade from older debian releases to Stretch, see our upgrade notes.

Note also that Debian 7 "Wheezy" is officially past end of support now, users still running this release or older should update as soon as possible. Please open a support ticket if you have any questions on how to go about that.

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Ubuntu 18.04 available

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Alex

The latest long term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu is now available for new installs. Ubuntu 18.04, also known as Bionic Beaver 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 version of Ubuntu are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes. This release of Ubuntu will be supported until April 2023. Ubuntu is one of the most popular linux server platforms, based on the solid Debian distribution. This release brings an update for Apache to version 2.4.29, with HTTP/2 support enabled. PHP has also been updated to version 7.2.x. The MySQL database server 5.7.22 is installed in our VPSs and MariaDB server 10.1.29 is also available.
Continue reading →

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Drupal Exploits – script to detect versions

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Liz Quilty

We are currently seeing a high volume of Drupal exploits running a lot of arbitrary code, including crypto mining, attacking other servers and similar due to this exploit  https://www.drupal.org/sa-core-2018-002

 

If you want to find out if you have any vulnerable Drupal installs quickly and easily i wrote a shell script for that . Just run the following from console

wget --no-check-certificate http://blog.rimuhosting.com/files/drupaldetect.sh
 
bash drupaldetect.sh

 

It will output something like this ..

root@servername:~# bash drupaldetct.sh  
You have version 7.58  located at /var/www/vsc/  
You have version 7.58  located at /var/www/vsfrts/  
You have version 7.23  located at /var/www/corehtapts/  
Looks like Drupal at /var/www/mgvec/ , but can't tell the version 
You have version 7.50  located at /var/www/courtland/drupal/  
You have version 7.0  located at /var/www/richvvrve/drupal/  
You have version 7.58  located at /var/www/mrvegc2/  
You have version 7.32  located at /var/www/ridvervee/drupal/

Any version prior to 7.58 is exploitable, and its safe to assume you should replace ALL the files as per https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/security/your-drupal-site-got-hacked-now-what

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32 to 64 bit distro crossgrades for Debian and Ubuntu

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Peter Bryant

The demise of 32 bit distros is nigh!

Some distros are dropping or reducing support for 32 bit versions.  e.g. only providing 64 bit ISO downloads.

Some software makers are no longer putting out 32 bit versions of their software.  e.g. Since version 9 Oracle have only released a 64 bit version of Java.

In most cases you will be fine to remain on 32 bit distros until you need some software application that is 64 bit only (e.g. Java 9 or Java 10).  If you have a lot of memory and are not limited by the 32 bit application 4GB per process limit then running a 64 bit kernel on a 32 bit distro can be a good option.

One way to escape your old or 32 bit distro is to setup a newer server and migrate to that (or reinstall your current one).  However for some customers this can be difficult.  Migrating databases.  Bringing across custom configs and cron jobs and bespoke setups.  Changing IPs.

If you do not have the luxury of a reinstall then you may want to consider a cross grade.  Where you convert a 32 bit distro to a 64 bit one.

We have been adding 32 to 64 bit cross grade support to our distrorejuve tool.  At the moment the script is in alpha.  We recommend you make a full server snapshot prior to starting the process.

You can run the distrorejuve 32 to 64 bit crossgrade as:

Continue reading →

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Modernizing your ancient server distro

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Peter Bryant

RimuHosting has now been providing VM servers for over 15 years.

Back in the day the state of the art distros we setup for customers included 32-bit Debian 3- and Ubuntu 6-based servers.

Things have moved on.  By default all new orders are setup with 64-bit distros.  And Debian is up to version 9, while Ubuntu 18.04 is about to be released.

The newer distros are almost exclusively the ones you will want.  They will have the latest libraries and applications.

Continue reading →

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