Month: October 2009

  • Postfix problems that keep popping up

    We have had several customers with postfix problems and they seem to be all of a similar nature, so i thought i would blog a couple. The most common one is trying to use both aliases and virtualhosts for a domain. Especially with Virtualmin which tries to do both. The main symptoms are something in…

  • Using libcloud with RimuHosting

    Libcloud.org has merged our RimuHosting driver into their Python library.  All of our api functionality isn’t included in that driver, but there are a number of handy things that you can do via just a smattering of python code.  I’m going to write a few articles on this topic to demonstrate some of the cool…

  • External MX Records

    I see this particular problem about once or twice a day it seems and probably have for as long as I’ve worked at Rimu. Sometimes customers opt to have their email handled via a 3rd party mail service (google apps, for example).  If the hostname of your server is example.com and you’re trying to send…

  • WordPress Upgrade Script 2.8.5

    Heres a little Shell Script I wrote which, if run, will check your entire server for insecure versions of wordpress.  If it finds any, it will give you the option to upgrade. If you say yes it will backup the existing sites file and database in /root/wp_upgrade and upgrade it. Please Note: This has not…

  • Spam Addresses

    I hate spam.  I really hate spam.  I guess everybody can relate to that.  I not only hate spam, but I don’t like receiving correspondence from some website that made me register to view some content or post a message, some site that that I’ve ordered from or any other place that I’ve had to…

  • Linux permissions, package management, chattr

    A customer emailed in today with a fresh install and was having problems with a basic upgrade. I tried running a yum update from the Webmin control panel, and got this error for the ‘rpm’ package: Updating : rpm [ 73/147]Error unpacking rpm package rpm-4.4.2.3-18.el5.i386 error: unpacking of archive failed on file /etc/cron.daily/rpm: cpio: rename…

  • Announcing the RimuHosting REST-ful API

    Announcing the RimuHosting API The RimuHosting API is an programmable interface to manage some of RimuHosting services. It lets you do things like setup new VPSs, add memory or disk to existing VPSs, check your data transfer usage, grab host server load stats, reboot servers, and most other actions that until now you could only…

  • Small Shell Script for monitoring

    A customer wanting to do basic monitoring , i had a google and found the following script which is very handy. #!/bin/bash # # Script to notify admin user if Linux,FreeBSD load crossed certain limit # It will send an email notification to admin. # # Copyright 2005 (c) nixCraft project # This is free…

  • checking the checksums of your binary packages

    Occasionally you just want a bit of piece of mind about your server or Linux install. You may suspect there is somebody who has hacked your computer or even something changed by a package install that shouldn’t have been. Heres a couple of ideas on how to do a quick ‘health’ check on he md5sum…

  • Adding timestamps to your bash history

    Often we’ve had boxes compromised, or commands run that we have no idea who did it and at what time. Its very frustrating, especially when we have no idea if a customer did it, one of the staff, or if a box was compromised. Glenn found this little snippet which is now default in all…