Category: Linux & Server Administration

  • Cron script for checking disk space

    Here is script for those that interested in not installing a daemon like monit, and just rely on a simple bash script to send notifications when the disk space is low. It is a quite common of a server crashing even though it has been well configured, that rotates logs, etc, but still receives an…

  • Distrubution release support (CentOS4/Debian 5)

    Linux distributions keep moving forwards, and as they progress older releases stop receiving security patches or updates. As part of our commitment to maintaining reliable and safe services, we would like to highlight the following announcements… CentOS-4 End Of Life The CentOS-4 distribution (current version 4.9) will be at End of Life on February 29,…

  • Centos brcm-iscsi.log

    We have noticed a log related to iscsi daemons filling up disk space on a few of our Centos 5 VPSs lately. There have been a few reports of this in other places: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-1046154.html It seems after you do a yum or apt-get update past Centos 5.6, this unneeded service will sometimes get enabled: #…

  • 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,

  • 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

  • Centos 6 released for VPS usage @ Rimuhosting

    We now have Centos 6 available for our new and existing customers to install if needed. There appear to be no major differences other than newer versions of software, and no problems installing it or gotchas. You can read the release here http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.0 If you already have an older VPS and want to reinstall ,

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…