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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…
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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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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is here!
We are pleased to announce the availability of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server for new setups. This release has been code named Xenial Xerus. The official release notes are available from the Ubuntu team here. Our new VPS images are based on the official builds provided directly from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com Significant updates in this release include
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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…