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Maintaining servers: Why updates must not wait
Recent vulnerabilities in cPanel and the Linux kernel have served as a stark reminder: unpatched servers aren’t just a theoretical risk. Whether you manage one VPS or a fleet of production machines, the question isn’t if but when your services will be affected. What’s at stake — the recent CVEs Over April and May this…
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Get started with Moodle
At Rimuhosting, we support a wide range of Moodle deployments — from simple academic setups to complex, high-availability platforms. This guide walks you through a clean and secure installation of Moodle 4.5 LTS, the latest long-term support release. Whether you’re launching a development instance, staging site, or preparing for full production, this setup gives you…
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Looney Tunables: ld.so library local privilege escalation (CVE-2023-4911)
Recently, Qualsys discovered a vulnerability (a buffer overflow) in the dynamic loader’s processing of the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. Which can result in an escalation from local user access to root. This has been labeled as CVE-2023-4911 Running package updates on your server will address this.
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Jailkit chroots with SFTP and interactive SSH logins
Linux has privileged users and non-privileged users. Privileged users (like root) have a user id less than 1000 and typically have super abilities like being able to listen on low number ports (like the port 80 and 443 for web servers). Privilege separation is a good thing. It is recommended when running websites that the…
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Server patch tool
Every now and then there is a security issue that has the potential to impact a large number of customers. RimuHosting has created a server patching tool that automates fixing or mitigating a number of these issues for its customers. Automated Schedule-able Web based Permits opt-out per issue Works across different Linux distros
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PolicyKit security hole
A security problem was recently announced that affects the linux distributions that we support. This is being called “PwnKit” (a.k.a. CVE-2021-4034). Most distributions have provided updates, so now is a good time to check and load outstanding OS security updates for your VPS, using apt for Debian and Ubuntu and yum for CentOS 7 and…
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CentOS Stream, RockyLinux and Alma Linux
Recently CentOS8 reached its supported end-of-life for security updates. For a number of reasons there will effectively be no more stable releases of CentOS 8 or later. Instead developers are being encouraged to look at CentOS Stream as a future proof option for elX based platforms. This is quite similar to how Gentoo and more…
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Centos announce Centos 8 retirement
Centos have announced that their RHEL8-based distro Centos8 will no longer be supported from December 2021. This affects customers running Centos 8. It also affects customers running older Centos versions that are thinking updating to a newer distro. There are many alternatives to consider. To mention a few: Centos 7. With support until 2024. RimuHosting…
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Distro upgrade as a service
For several years we have worked with customers to upgrade dozens of servers (primarily Debian and Ubuntu) from old (sometimes ancient) distro versions to the latest, stable versions. We are now offering this distro upgrade as a service. The upgrade steps are as follows: We collect systems information to ensure your setup is updatable (e.g.…
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Centos8 + Apache + Tomcat + LetsEncrypt Setup
A popular setup for Tomcat is to run it as a backend behind Apache. This lets you use Apache for some websites and URLs and Tomcat for others (while keeping the same IP address and port). Another common requirement is to have a valid SSL certificate. This HOWTO describes that setup. The HOWTO is for…