RimuHosting Blog

Tag: Server administration

  • Fixing broken permissions or ownership

    People are not perfect, not even the staff here. Perfection is not required to be a sysadmin we found, just some good shell scripts to fix things when you break them accidentally. One of the more common accidents are chown or chmod ones, especially the ones done as root from / . Its easy to…

  • Using swap within a VPS

    In a virtual environment, disk io can be about the most expensive operation there is. And swap (virtual memory) depends on that heavily. By default we configure a small swap partition for each VPS server so conditions where memory is exhausted can be detected more consistently,

  • Checking a potentially hacked machine and reinstalling packages when you break things

    Sometimes you may see something odd go past in the logs, on the screen, or something might just seem a bit ‘off’ somehow. Its a good idea when this happens to just double check that things are as they should be, verify packages, binaries, check logs etc Here are a few things i find helpful…

  • Why is your server sending spam? why does it keep crashing with high load?

    We get asked these questions regularly, and 9 out of 10 times it may be because your server may have been hacked, either on a user level, web application, or more. Here are some ways to quickly check for the most common things we see , and some of the processes we go through to…

  • Could not perform immediate configuration on already unpacked ‘util-linux’.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details

    Today we had a customer who had somehow broken his apt package manager doing an upgrade from the looks. I googled and found the same error in many places, most resorting to reinstalling or purging the package to clear it, or reinstall. The error looked like this

  • Apache exploit may crash your server – heres how to fix it

    We have picked up that there was an exploit in Apache which can result in your server running out of memory. the discovery was noticed quiet some time ago, but never fixed, and it seems to have reared its head publicly resulting in some people actively attacking. There is no patch for apache as yet,…

  • Wildcard DNS queries added to our DNS API

    We are updating our DNS API (Zonomi and RimuHosting) to support a name/host argument of **.example.com (where example.com is your DNS zone).  This will find any DNS records ending with example.com. This could be used, for example, in providing your own UI from end to our name servers.  Or for setting up slave DNS servers.…

  • PCI compliance – a basic HOWTO

    A lot of people are wanting to be PCI compliant these days, and this is generally a good thing. PCI compliance is not just a server spec, but a list of procedures, policies, controls over access to data. Therefore the server side is only one part of the process. It can be expensive and time…

  • Centos 6 released for VPS usage @ Rimuhosting

    We now have Centos 6 available for our new and existing customers to install if needed. There appear to be no major differences other than newer versions of software, and no problems installing it or gotchas. You can read the release here http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.0 If you already have an older VPS and want to reinstall ,

  • WordPress mass update script 3.2.1

    This script will search /var/www (changeable in a variable) for any wordpress installs and make sure its upgraded to the latest version. It will run a backup to /root/wp_upgrade/ of all files and database before doing anything with the site in case of major catastrophe (make sure you have spare disk space if your sites…