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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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Solve Letsencrypt (including Certbot) problems caused by rogue .htaccess files
At RimuHosting we’re enthusiastic about how Let’s Encrypt gives website owners a great way to secure their websites. And certbot is the tool we usually recommend to get a Let’s Encrypt certificate. We find it’s easy to use and works well on recent distributions. However, sometimes issuing or renewing a certificate fails. A common reason…
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Ubuntu 18.04 available
The latest long term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu is now available for new installs. Ubuntu 18.04, also known as Bionic Beaver can be ordered at https://rimuhosting.com/order/v2orderstart.jsp. It’s also an option to consider if you reinstall an existing VPS. The official release notes for version of Ubuntu are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes. This release of Ubuntu…
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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…
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Using Ansible to manage your VPSs – Part Two
In this post I’m going to introduce playbooks, and show you how to customise the /etc/resolv.conf file on each server. I assume you have followed Part One of this series and have created a hosts file and files in ~/myansible/host_vars/. Tasks, playbooks, groups and roles A note on terminology. A task is something done on…
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Using Ansible to manage your VPSs – Part One
Ansible is a system to automate the updating of server configurations and other administration tasks. In this post I’ll explain what’s necessary to get started with Ansible, creating a configuration structure, telling Ansble about your hosts and running ad-hock commands on multiple hosts. Ansible is useful when you have 3 or more VPSs and need…
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LXD containers now available for Ubuntu
The latest Ubuntu LTS release, Xenial 16.04 , comes with support for a container system called LXD. LXD builds on the existing LXC container system, allowing for more convenient management of those containers. In this post I show how you can test out LXD containers on a Rimu VPS running Ubuntu 16.04. I assume you…
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Install ownCloud on a Rimu VPS
Owncloud is a popular file storage and synchronization system, with many additional features available for it. It’s a self-hosted alternative to systems like dropbox, but with owncloud your files are stored on your own servers. This allows you to meet requirements to keep data in a certain jurisdiction, for example, or it might give you…
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Keeping WordPress secure
According to Wikipedia, “WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.” It’s also the most commonly installed blogging system on our customers’ servers, and we use it to run the blog you’re reading right now. One factor that has contributed to WordPress ‘s popularity is…