Tag: Linux

  • 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…

  • Updating old installs – Plesk – and other nasty issues

    When choosing a VPS often people go with the distro that suits them best, usually one they find easy to manage. Whilst this is fine, you also need to remember that at some stage in the future you will need to reinstall or upgrade. Debian/Ubuntu based distros seem to scale and upgrade versions fine with…

  • Virtualmin on the command line

    We often encourage our users to use software which is better, and does things in a standard way. When it comes to control panels we prefer Virtualmin. It works with the distro you are using and the packages that come with it rather than setting up things in its own odd way and tieing you…

  • 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

  • Keeping your SSH session alive

    We’re working on servers all day everyday, mostly by SSH. This can be annoying when you switch tabs and then want to go back to another and its timed you out and dead. A nice quick shortcut to kill that session is to type in ‘~.’ This needs to be on a new line so…

  • Daily PostgreSQL Backups

    We have had a few backup scripts posted, however i noticed today when a customer asked for a postgreSQL one we don’t actually have one handy. This one is for a daily dump of the database, rolling over every 10 days

  • Ubuntu Upgrade to 10.04 on your VPS? Read this first!

    Update: Carl has posted some 10.04 upgrade instructions in our howtos section. As often happens, some things happen when you upgrade, and its not always desirable when its a production server. We try and catch these for you and post something to help fix anything that may go wrong. The problem requires a kernel change…

  • Bandwidth useage and control – mod_deflate

    I’ve seen a few times clients with lots of web traffic struggling, and in some cases they had some advance stuff like load-balancing and memcached, and they didn’t even have compressed html! To me is puzzling that many people don’t have it when it takes a couple lines of code and saves typically a good…

  • 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…