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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…
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Quick and easy iptables blocking and firewalling basics
A customer emailed in today had noticed somebody trying to hack or crash his VPS. He tracked it down to one particular IP address but didnt know how to block him. There are several things you can do to block him, the long term solution and better option is probably using a firewall like iptables.…
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What can you do when AI Bots steal your content and hammer your websites?
We’ve noticed a significant increase in bad bots crawling our servers, causing high load and ignoring robots.txt directives. Many of these are AI bots, along with some overly aggressive search engine crawlers. This might not be an issue for larger servers, but for smaller setups, it can easily cripple a website. A few things we’ve…
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Beyond Gmail: Taking back control of your own email address
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. – Douglas McIlroy Still borrowing an email address? Are you running your business or personal brand from @gmail.com, @outlook.com, or even an address tied to your ISP? Imagine you’re a small business owner who relied on their ISP-provided email address…
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Wireguard VPN setup
Wireguard is a modern, easy to setup, VPN. It has clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, and other OSes. In this post we are following the guide at https://serversideup.net/how-to-set-up-wireguard-vpn-server-on-ubuntu-20-04/ First, Order a VM. This will be the ‘server’ for the VPN. You don’t need a lot of memory or disk to run a VPN…
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Woop! WordPress hosting launch
Today we launch our Woop! WordPress hosting service. We are pretty excited about this. Many of our RimuHosting customers run WordPress on the VMs they host with us. That makes sense since 30% of the world’s sites run on WordPress. For over a decade we have been working with these customers to keep their WordPress…
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“Sad SACK” network protection
Netflix has identified several vulnerabilities in the TCP networking stack that affects all Linux users with un-patched kernels. The vulnerabilities have been assigned CVE-2019-11477, CVE-2019-11478 and CVE-2019-11479. All three issues have already been mitigated for all our VPS customers. The original advisory says… The vulnerabilities specifically relate to the minimum segment size (MSS) and TCP…
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Modernizing your ancient server distro
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…
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Whitelist your own computer in fail2ban
Fail2ban is a great “dynamic” firewall for servers that is installed by default on many of our VPSs, and we can install it on your VPSs at your request. It protects against brute-force attacks, where an attacker is trying to guess a password or exploit certain classes of vulnerabilities on servers. One potential problem with…