Author: Liz Quilty

  • Monitoring your server

    Its always a good option to have monitoring, and there are a lot of options available. If you are interested in uptime and notifications, you can use a service like http://pingability.com If you are interested in making sure services are up and running, and have more time to spare there are a lot of amazing…

  • WordPress mass update script 3.3.1

    This script will search /var/www (changeable in a variable) for any wordpress installs and make sure its upgraded to the latest version. It will run a backup to /root/wp_upgrade/ of all files and database before doing anything with the site in case of major catastrophe (make sure you have spare disk space if your sites…

  • WordPress mass update script 3.3

    This script will search /var/www (changeable in a variable) for any wordpress installs and make sure its upgraded to the latest version. It will run a backup to /root/wp_upgrade/ of all files and database before doing anything with the site in case of major catastrophe (make sure you have spare disk space if your sites…

  • Fixing broken permissions or ownership

    People are not perfect, not even the staff here. Perfection is not required to be a sysadmin we found, just some good shell scripts to fix things when you break them accidentally. One of the more common accidents are chown or chmod ones, especially the ones done as root from / . Its easy to…

  • Using swap within a VPS

    In a virtual environment, disk io can be about the most expensive operation there is. And swap (virtual memory) depends on that heavily. By default we configure a small swap partition for each VPS server so conditions where memory is exhausted can be detected more consistently,

  • Checking a potentially hacked machine and reinstalling packages when you break things

    Sometimes you may see something odd go past in the logs, on the screen, or something might just seem a bit ‘off’ somehow. Its a good idea when this happens to just double check that things are as they should be, verify packages, binaries, check logs etc Here are a few things i find helpful…

  • Why is your server sending spam? why does it keep crashing with high load?

    We get asked these questions regularly, and 9 out of 10 times it may be because your server may have been hacked, either on a user level, web application, or more. Here are some ways to quickly check for the most common things we see , and some of the processes we go through to…

  • Could not perform immediate configuration on already unpacked ‘util-linux’.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details

    Today we had a customer who had somehow broken his apt package manager doing an upgrade from the looks. I googled and found the same error in many places, most resorting to reinstalling or purging the package to clear it, or reinstall. The error looked like this

  • Hurricane Irene approaching New York

    As you may be aware there is a hurricane approaching New York. We have posted an operations notice https://rimuhosting.com/maintenance.jsp?server_maint_oid=597636491 Now may be a good time for customers (especially NY-based ones) to take a moment to check their backup and recovery procedures.  And ensure you are well prepared for any resulting incidents. Things to consider: Always know…

  • Apache exploit may crash your server – heres how to fix it

    We have picked up that there was an exploit in Apache which can result in your server running out of memory. the discovery was noticed quiet some time ago, but never fixed, and it seems to have reared its head publicly resulting in some people actively attacking. There is no patch for apache as yet,…