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Rimuhosting May 2015 newsletter
A recap of recent improvements We have been doing some major networking upgrades over in Dallas. Lots of 10G fiber being run. More uplink capacity. More capacity between servers. We have expanded our global presence to Frankfurt. You can order a VM there. Or we can provide custom quotes for dedicated servers there. Intel keeps…
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Dallas network upgrade
Dallas is our busiest location. We have many, many cabinets there filled with wonderfully shiny servers (all black, as befits our Kiwi origins). That setup has grown somewhat organically since 2005. Our core networking wiring was starting to be a little scary. And network capacity (ports and bandwidth was staring to be an issue). So…
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Brute force SSH protection
We have implemented some brute force SSH attack protection on VMs. Your servers should start to receive fewer connections from bots trying to bruteforce crack passwords on your server user accounts. Behind the scenes we have setup honey trap servers. Botnets with no good reason to connect to these servers attempt to connect to the…
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NTP servers and DoS Attacks
NTP servers have been in the news over the New Year, as security sites and social media talk about potential attacks. This is important because many linux servers run ntpd to help keep their clock time correct. One of the first reports and some solutions are clearly described on litnet … In LITNET we recently…
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MySQL replication and verification
We have a number of customer using MySQL replication. For the uninitiated, replication copies changes from a master server to a number of slave servers. This makes scaling your service mush easier and helps improve redundancy and failover. An introduction to setting that up is available in our Mysql Replication guide. Once you have replication…
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Old tomcat 5.5 installs being exploited
We have noticed a couple of people running older tomcat 5.5 installs, and these are being exploited . The main thing we noticed were slowdowns on bandwidth as well as CPU along with a few odd other things running as tomcat user eg www-data 20654 0.0 0.6 38616 8004 ? S 21:26 0:00 \_ /usr/sbin/apache2…
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DNS amplification DoS attacks
If you are running a DNS server, then you need to check it is not being co-opted into ‘DNS amplification attacks’. Random nasty servers (typically part of virus created bot-nets) send your DNS server a short request but use a fake source IP address. Your DNS server then sends a (typically) long reply back to…
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Blocking malicious crawlers or scrapers in Apache
Occasionally we see a customer who has a popular website that often gets people trying to crawl it and copy the lot, This has the unfortunate side effect that its hammering the site. Made worse only by dynamic pages and loops this can literally take down a server in some occasions. Often you can slow…
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Zonomi DNS TTL improvements
There have been a few updates to the Zonomi service (and RimuHosting’s DNS as well after the next code push there). These changes have been added to help address improve the service for a few ‘niche/advanced’ users. Time To Live (TTL) edits TTL values tell name servers how long they can cache DNS results before…
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Up-sized VPS options in Australia
We are happy to announce that we have had some super fast servers land in Brisbane with a ton of memory. As a result we can now offer even faster servers with more memory for less money. Isn’t Moore’s law great? See: http://rimuhosting.com/order/vpspricing.jsp?dc_location=DCBRISBANE We recently spec-ed out, built and shipped a bunch of new Jaketown…