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Setting up Monit + with tomcat
We get asked a lot by customers to install and setup monit. Its not an overly hard task, in fact its pretty darned easy. Monit is brilliant for monitoring and restarting services when they are down, it can alert you or just restart after 5 failed connects/attempts. It handles everything from disk space, to memory,…
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Its the small things that help
We have some users who own VPS who dont want to fork out for automated systems like Plesk or Virtualmin, but dont really want to deal with adding domains and email addresses all the time (and sometimes get lost) I decided today after one such user emailed us to add another 3 domains and bunch…
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Easy Peasy Linux Firewalling – iptables
A lot of our customers have asked for firewalls, and since this is a common theme, i decided that I would help them out. Of course it can be a mission to learn how to make your own and what to do or not do, and some of the pre-made ones can be confusing. So…
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rdiff-backup script using sshfs for larger backups
We have had a few customers who have much more data to back up, and taking a copy of that every day uses a LOT of disk space and can be time consuming. The answer is rdiff-backup . It does incremental backups whenever you run it, only backing up the difference from the initial complete…
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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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Quick and easy iptables blocking and firewalling basics
A customer emailed in today had noticed somebody trying to hack or crash his VPS. He tracked it down to one particular IP address but didnt know how to block him. There are several things you can do to block him, the long term solution and better option is probably using a firewall like iptables.…
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checking the checksums of your binary packages
Occasionally you just want a bit of piece of mind about your server or Linux install. You may suspect there is somebody who has hacked your computer or even something changed by a package install that shouldn’t have been. Heres a couple of ideas on how to do a quick ‘health’ check on he md5sum…
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Does your VPS have MD5 enabled for passwords?
We recently discovered that the way we install a VPS differs slightly from the usual CD install. This is not something we do specifically but something that can be improved on in the set-ups of CentOS5.3. When you install from a CD it automatically enables MD5 encryption in passwords (which should be the norm), however…
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libc6 vs libc6-xen problems with applications segfaulting
We recieved the following email this morning which may be a problem from time to time with other users, so i thought I would share this. Subject: Seg faults on apache mysql and a couple of other less import programs. Probably need a fresh install. Message: Hi I have a serious problem with my VPS…