• DNS import script project. Any takers?

    A bit of a cheeky request… I’m looking for something that will import a BIND zone file in our name servers. Anyone interested in having a crack at that? I’m imagining something like a bash/perl/ruby/python script that parses a BIND zone file then uses our DNS api per http://rimuhosting.com/dns/dyndns.jsp to pop the values into our…


  • Bandwidth useage and control – mod_deflate

    I’ve seen a few times clients with lots of web traffic struggling, and in some cases they had some advance stuff like load-balancing and memcached, and they didn’t even have compressed html! To me is puzzling that many people don’t have it when it takes a couple lines of code and saves typically a good…


  • Fun with lawyers, politicians and copyright

    Like a lot of software developers I take an interest in copyright issues.  I read the odd article, watch Linus and Richard debate GPL3, and was even once motivated enough to make a submission on another recent NZ copyright bill. The New Zealand government has a bill on the table looking at file sharing.  One…


  • Failover – What happens when your VPS goes down?

    A lot of customers are realizing that having 1 single VPS is great, but if for some reason it goes down and crashes, customers are left wondering what happened. Whilst rimuhosting monitor long term excessive CPU useage, it might be an hour before we realize a VPS has had an OOM error (out of memory)…


  • Easy Peasy Linux Firewalling – iptables

    A lot of our customers have asked for firewalls, and since this is a common theme, i decided that I would help them out. Of course it can be a mission to learn how to make your own and what to do or not do, and some of the pre-made ones can be confusing. So…


  • Rimu Hosting – not Rim U Hosting

    When our great leader Peter set out to take over the world with his new and awesome hosting company (ok, maybe it wasnt quiet like that .. but it makes a great story!) ,  he decide that he wanted it to have a Kiwi/NZ flavour. He set up several companies and named them all after…


  • wordpress & wordpress MU mass upgrade script 2.9.2

    Okay, I have rolled the usual ‘upgrade all instances of wordpress’ script. In this version i finally got around to checking the permissions prior to updating and changing the ownership of them back to that owner afterwards. This was breaking things and could be rather annoying before if you had more than 5  sites to…


  • Rimuhosting does LCA2010

    A couple of the die hard Linux fanatics here at Rimuhosting decided to bribe the boss into letting us go to Linux.conf.au this year, and in fact even managed to get him to become a little blue penguin sponsor. Luckily we have a fantastic employer[1] who was keen to get rid of us. We had…


  • Picking Your Distro

    We frequently get questions asking which distribution to choose. The short answer is – pick whatever distribution you’re currently using if it’s one that you like and are comfortable using. :) It’s not going to make a tremendous difference at the end of the day and the differences are mostly in the way you’ll manage…


  • Whats using all my disk space up?

    Often we get asked by customers ‘What is using up all my disk space on my VPS?’. Usually we track it down to log files not being rotated or email etc. Here are a few of the commands we use to do that.