Latest writing

  • Trying out the new Thunderbird 3

    One of my co-workers mentioned something about thunderbirds new features, i thought this is an excellent time to break my mail client! so promptly looked up installing the new thunderbird. My work box is Ubuntu, so here’s the easiest process to get Thunderbird 3 installed I used Ubuntuzilla to get the latest packages http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ubuntuzilla/index.php?title=Main_Page echo…

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  • Quick and Easy Automatic Backup Script

    At Rimuhosting we do a weekly snapshot backup of your VPS. This means that if anything goes wrong you can revert to the previous image. However since its weekly, not daily, you may find you have lost the data between those dates. This is a backup script that will backup your database and required files…

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  • PHP 5.2 on Centos upgrade

    Many of our customers request upgrading php to the latest stable version. Unfortunately CentOS does not have anything beyond 5.1.* in the official repository. We used to setup the remi repository as per http://rimuhosting.com/howto/php.jsp However, Remi moved on to the latest 5.3 branch. Unfortunately the 5.3 branch is not compatible with most php CMS/blogs out…

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  • WordPress Upgrade 2.9.0 + a bug

    Okay, I have rolled the usual ‘upgrade all instances of wordpress’ script however there is a bug in the current wordpress. Heres your script to upgrade them all. wget http://b.ri.mu/files/wordpress-upgrade-2.9.0.sh ; sh wordpress-upgrade-2.9.0.sh Heres the info in the bug. If you see a lot of this in your error log and your site is being…

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  • Holiday Hijinks

    A few folks here in the office decided to have a bit of fun outside. We caught it on tape and have decided to share it with all of you. :) Video

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  • Virtualmin and Webmin upgrade errors & the fix

    We had a customer email in saying they were having a problem upgrading. The error was fairly verbose, but the general gist was this –> Processing Dependency: /usr/libexec/webmin for package: wbt-virtual-server-mobile –> Processing Dependency: /usr/libexec/webmin for package: wbm-virtualmin-mailman –> Processing Dependency: /usr/libexec/webmin for package: wbm-ruby-gems –> Processing Dependency: /usr/libexec/webmin for package: wbm-ruby-gems –> Finished Dependency…

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  • Keeping things going over the holiday season

    Well its that time of year again, and you do NOT want to be dealing with broken servers over Xmas. Heres a few tips to make sure things stay honkey dory over the Xmas period. Upgrades: Dont upgrade anything, do not do a new release, do  not change anything at all. Sometimes even something that’s…

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  • Keeping Tabs on Successful Logins

    There are a number of things that any sysadmin should be doing (or is already doing) to keep tabs on the systems they manage. One of the things that I do which is quite simple (read: quick and dirty) is having my server send me a message anytime a user logs into the server. I…

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  • RimuHosting December 2009 newsletter

    This post is a copy of the newsletter just sent out to customers. News in brief We are now offering hosting based out of Auckland, New Zealand. http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2009/11/20/rimuhosting-launches-nz-based-vps-hosting/ In November we launched the RimuHosting cloud server management API. Create servers, shut them down, reboot them, fetch a server status. We have written wrappers/drivers for libcloud,…

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  • RimuHosting visit by Richard Stallman

    Free and open source software are so important at RimuHosting. Our servers would be pretty useless without the Linux kernel and free and open source applications we install on them. We try to do our bit for ‘software freedom’ like http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2009/09/24/rimuhosting-does-software-freedom-day/ providing OSS develeoper discounts and sponsoring events like LCA2010 http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2009/12/08/rimuhosting-at-linuconf-2010/ But our efforts are…

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