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Letsencrypt with Zonomi and Rimuhosting name servers using hooks
SSL is good, you should use it everywhere! Letsencrypt it is a project that allows you to obtain signed certificates for free (you should consider donating though) to secure your website. Big efforts have been done to make this accessible to anyone. In order to issue SSL certificates Certificate Authorities will check that you can control…
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Virtualmin Changes binding from ip:80 to *:80 and breaks older configs … FIX
We have found some virtualmin installs will change the format of new virtualhosts from ip:80 to *:80 sometimes which breaks virtualhosts as the *:80 overrides the ip:80. This can result in websites showing another website content, and usually shows up right after you add a new domain in virtualmin.
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Reboot-less Xen patching
Recently there have been two sets of Xen vulnerabilities. One being disclosed in September, the other earlier today. Historically we have had to organize host updates which required downtime to reboot VMs. For these last sets of vulnerabilities we have been able to use a recently introduced live patching feature in Xen to mitigate the…
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DKIM and subaddressing added to 25mail.st
We have added a couple of features to the 25mail.st service. First, we now support DKIM email signing. This lets our email servers sign outgoing messages so that recipients can verify that the email was sent from an authorized server. You will need to add a DNS entry for each email domain wishing to have…
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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 Fail2ban on wordpress wp-login.php and xmlrpc.php
A fair few customer of ours use wordpress and occasionally notice that there are people hammering on a few URLs This can cause high load, slow websites and a number of issues, espoecuially when you have more than a single IP hammering away at that. The solution is simple, and it involves using fail2ban. Here…
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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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New options for reduced VM pricing!
Not every server needs priority CPU, backups, and 24×7 fully managed support. We have added a few options on our http://launchtimevps.com ordering interface to let you tweak these settings to enable you to get a lower price for your server if that is appropriate. Option to enable/disable backups. Less disk space usage costs less. Select…
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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…