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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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sshmnt installation and useage for backups
So you want to use sshfs to do a backup? We have had a couple of customers unsure what to do when the sshfs command is not found. Its not too hard to do. Debian based VPS can just run apt-get install sshfs Centos doesnt come with it by default and you need to install […]
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Unsure who is sending spam? Try this
Anyone who has hosted peoples websites before, has had either a blog hacked, or some guy thinking he is going to send mass mailouts using PHP or similar happen. Its extremely hard to trackdown and deal with, and yet it can get your server listed at spam service denying legitimate email from getting through. This […]
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Problems with HDDs, so Rimuhosting.com gets a hardware upgrade
Procrastination is a horrible thing. A few weeks back Carl here setup a brand new Nehalem server for us to pop the RimuHosting website onto. RimuHosting had been running on one of our lowest speced Core 2 servers for couple of years now. And it had been doing pretty well. But hey, why not upgrade? […]
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Does your VPS have MD5 enabled for passwords?
We recently discovered that the way we install a VPS differs slightly from the usual CD install. This is not something we do specifically but something that can be improved on in the set-ups of CentOS5.3. When you install from a CD it automatically enables MD5 encryption in passwords (which should be the norm), however […]
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One Java init script to rule them all
Need an init script for a Java service? Like tomcat, liferay, or jboss? Regular Linux init scripts often don’t work so well. e.g. Java apps typically want to be run by a particular user (e.g. tomcat or liferay). e.g. They may require a ‘special’ shutdown mechanism (e.g. with Tomcat sending a signal to a particular port). So over the years I have had a handy-dandy script that can control most of my most commonly used Java apps (liferay, tomcat, jboss). It does things like start up the app as a particular user. Checks to ensure the app is responding on a URL before saying it is stared. Waits for the app to shutdown gracefully, else forces it to quit. And provides kill and killstart commands when you’re developing and just want the thing restarted! This morning I updated it to use the lsb logging methods. So the output is a bit prettier than the ‘old’ echo’s we used to use. The current version of the file will live at http://proj.ri.mu/javainitscript To use it wget that to the /etc/init.d directory on your server. Then rename (or symlink) it to the service you want to control. Currently the tomcat, liferay and jboss names are supported. Some excerpts from the script follow…