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DigiNotar and SSL certificates
Great news! We were pretty sure, but a recent notification from our certificate supplier told us that none of the certificates ordered on behalf of our customers are signed by DigiNotar. For those of you not aware, DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority who provided signed SSL Certificates against their own trust chain. Which was recognized…
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Package management using apt-get
Our support team receives a few queries each day about managing packages under Linux. All our installs have the APT toolset installed. We have a guide on some of the basic uses listed on our HowTo page. There are a a number of uses which can make life easier which I will detail below, but…
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Easy web server Load-Balancing with HAProxy
Configuring load balancing between multiple web servers may seem challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. HAProxy is a great lightweight tool that is easy to setup and has a large number of rich features for managing and serving content. Lets look at a simple scenario using two application or web servers n2 and n3,…
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Storage Clustering Part 2: GlusterFS
GlusterFS is an interesting solution for providing redundant network attached storage clusters. Some features include… trivially easy for basic setups supports virtually any file-system no need to mess with kernels can work across commodity network hardware suitable for enterprise deployment has commercial support available GlusterFS can scale well also, its simple configuration based storage is…
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Easy IP failover (Debian squeeze)
Say you have a bunch of servers on a fast private network, running a busy web site. And you need a gateway server so you can reach those from the outside world. You might run a proxy on a gateway server to expose that. However there could be a problem accessing your site if that…
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Storage Clustering Part 1: An Introduction
John and I have recently been looking at server clusters, and how they can be provisioned to best fit our customers needs. This post is the first in (hopefully) a series on the results of that research. To start with in this post I would like highlight some common questions about big storage options. If…
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Jira Issue Tracker install script
Recently I posted about a script to install Confluence. At the same time I was working on an install script for the Jira® issue tracker (also from Atlassian®) as the underlying setup is quite similar and they are often used together. Jira is great for keep track of issues while providing a lot of tools…
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Confluence Wiki install script
Quite often lately we have been asked to set up a Java based wiki, or customers have asked specifically for Confluence® (made by Atlassian® ) by name. Confluence is a powerful and sometimes complex piece of software, so to make the setup for that easier I created an install script. In a very short time…
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Debian v6.0 (Squeeze) released
Debian is one of our most popular distros. Being very well suited for servers. Debian 6.0 (aka squeeze) is now released. It is a good option for a stable distro, with a good support life for package updates. And right now it has a great, fresh set of new server-side app versions. Squeeze is available…
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London special, two months free hosting!
** Update: this offer is officially closed. If you are looking for cheap dedicated server options ask us about our Dallas based Core2Duo plans. We recently had a few unusual servers released to us. These powerful chassis are in an interesting fixed configuration, with 2xDual quad core E5410 Xeon CPUs, 24G RAM, and with 2x750G…