-
Older versions of debian and updates
We have come across several users who run older versions of debian. This is usually fine, sometimes for some reasons users are unable to update for some time but require a package to be installed. This is where the fun begins…
-
Security at home – encrypted home directories
This isn’t directly server related at all, more for the home or office user who wants to make sure things are nice and secure. At the office we like to also make sure our desktops are fairly safe to connect from as well, mostly in case the machines ever get stolen, we know our data…
-
inode problems and full disks
Today we had a customer who had an interesting problem. They were getting the message ‘disk is full’ despite having plenty of free space. Luckily for him, my first thought was ‘inodes?’ I logged in and checked his inode usage
-
Failover – What happens when your VPS goes down?
A lot of customers are realizing that having 1 single VPS is great, but if for some reason it goes down and crashes, customers are left wondering what happened. Whilst rimuhosting monitor long term excessive CPU useage, it might be an hour before we realize a VPS has had an OOM error (out of memory)…
-
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…
-
Rimuhosting does LCA2010
A couple of the die hard Linux fanatics here at Rimuhosting decided to bribe the boss into letting us go to Linux.conf.au this year, and in fact even managed to get him to become a little blue penguin sponsor. Luckily we have a fantastic employer[1] who was keen to get rid of us. We had…
-
Picking Your Distro
We frequently get questions asking which distribution to choose. The short answer is – pick whatever distribution you’re currently using if it’s one that you like and are comfortable using. :) It’s not going to make a tremendous difference at the end of the day and the differences are mostly in the way you’ll manage…
-
Whats using all my disk space up?
Often we get asked by customers ‘What is using up all my disk space on my VPS?’. Usually we track it down to log files not being rotated or email etc. Here are a few of the commands we use to do that.
-
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…
-
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…