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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…
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Debian Squeeze (6) ends support – time to upgrade
February 29th, 2016 marks the end of LTS Support for Debian Squeeze, which is still used by many of our customers. This means that updates for known security issues will no longer be produced and over time, a server running this version will become vulnerable to being exploited. Squeeze was released in 2011 and was…
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Don’t let the OOM killer stop MySQL
Many of our customers are successfully using MySQL (or MariaDB) databases on their servers, and they usually run fine as installed and do not need any special attention. However, occasionally problems can occur with MySQL, and this may indicate that some manual tuning is required. One scenario is when the system is short of memory,…
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Using Vagrant to Manage Rimu VPS systems
Vagrant is high level wrapper around virtualization and configuration management software. It simplifies the creation and management of easily reproduceable environments. It is particularly suited for development and test enviroments where servers are brought up and down frequently. It can also be used to bootstrap production systems. It can be used with configuration management software…
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WordPress + nginx quick setup
WordPress is a very popular blogging platform. We have a number of posts on how to set it up and keep it up to date on here already. In general those methods focus on deploying under the Apache web server. Recently we were pointed to a scripted method developed by they guys at rtcamp.com. They…
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Running Vagrant in your VPS
Vagrant is often used to set up development environments in a standardized way, so that your software project deployed via vagrant has a standard environment with all the operating system components and set-up it needs to work properly. It creates a virtual machine to provide this environment, so that different developers can work on it…
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Restoring an Exploited WordPress files
I previously had a 10 step process to replace all the files in a wordpress, this got rid of most file based exploits. Since then i have written a shell script that pretty much incorperates that wget http://blog.rimuhosting.com/files/restorewordpress.sh chmod +x restorewordpress.sh ./restorewordpress.sh /full/path/to/documentroot Note: This does not do custom themes or plugins (only ones from…
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Tuning apache for production use
Apache is probably the most common web service our customers use. It is an amazingly powerful and mature tool for serving all your website needs. And is very easy to get up and running with Our team is often asked to tune apache to run more smoothly, more quickly, and more reliably. With a few…
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Connecting to MySQL from external sources + IPTables
By default, MySQL only allows local connections. This is due to security, and for the most part works just fine for most people. Ideally you can use things like PHPMyAdmin for things like this, or even command line. Occasionally people need to connect from externally, either from a web front end, or some other PC,…