• David’s Handy Scripts – bandwidth usage – disk usage

    I thought a useful addition to our blog might be a running series of handy scripts.  Just for the sake of things (and because I couldn’t find a better title), I’m calling the series “David’s Handy Scripts”.  I’ll get this show on the road with a quick script I put together to track 2 things…


  • Ubuntu 9.04 bug with networking directory creation

    We had a customer email in after updating to Jaunty recently. They said the following Hi guys, I upgraded my VPS a little while back to Ubuntu Jaunty (because I was several versions out of date and the apt repositories had gone away.) I never actually rebooted the machine afterwards though because it wasn’t a…


  • Fixing apache file and directory permissions

    I’ve seen this problem a few times, people having trouble getting the permissions right for websites. Heres a quick fix that will sort you in most cases For directories run find /path/to/domain/public_html/ -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755 Files run this one find /path/to/domain/public_html/ -type f | xargs chmod 644 Make sure you…


  • Introduction to the new Linux Sysadmin

    Recently we have had a few support requests come through from people who are new to Linux, and are unsure how to maintain a server at all. Package Management If your Linux distro is RedHat based (ie Centos, , then you will be using yum and RPM.   RPM is for doing individual package manipulation (installing,…


  • Chrome OS and Linux

    I had high hopes for netbooks bringing about an increased mindshare for Linux for ordinary users.  This didn’t quite pan out unfortunately and it’s nigh impossible to find a Linux netbook at a brick and mortar store these days.  Users loved the low price and mobility of a netbook, but (seemingly) didn’t appreciate the lack…


  • The Pool table that never happened

    Now here’s a story about how awesome our boss Peter is, and how our offices are just a little to hard to get too at times .. Once apon a time, Rimuhosting was based in a room in Peters house (like all good start-up companies). Eventually he gained the trust of many  customers and made…


  • Congratulations to RailsBridge bug mashers

    Congratulations to Josh, Marshall, and Jordan who each won one of the RimuHosting-supplied prizes at the recent RailsBridge BugMash. The BugMash was to identify, narrow down, reproduce, provide test cases and patch Rails bugs.  From their site: Here’s how it will work: the BugMash will run over the weekend of August 8-9. The Rails team…


  • WordPress Upgrade Script

    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…


  • Is your WordPress install exploitable?

    WordPress is a great application.  e.g. we are using it here for this brand new blog. The irony is that the first post on this blog is a security alert on a WordPress exploit. There is a good summary of the issue at http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/08/12/1353211/WordPress-Exploit-Allows-Admin-Password-Reset Are you running WordPress?  We do not install it on accounts…