Tweet Hello! We threw together a quick & simple script to dynamically update your .htaccess files within apache to add your dynamic IP address to the allow / deny fields. If you’re looking to password protect an admin area (for example) but your office only has a dynamic IP address, then this script might be [...] Read More
Automated Amazon EBS snapshot backup script with 7 day retention
Tweet Hello there! We have recently been implementing several different backup strategies for properties that reside on the Amazon cloud platform. These strategies include scripts that incorporate s3sync and s3fs for offsite or redundant “limitless” backup storage capabilities. One of the more recent strategies we have implemented for several clients is an automated Amazon EBS [...] Read More
Managed VPS hosting services from Star Dot Hosting
Tweet Click here for a free quote for managed vps hosting! Hello, I thought I’d update our blog to let everyone know that we offer our extensive managed services catalog on our VPS infrastructure! If you are looking for high quality managed services from systems administrators with extensive experience, then contact our sales department for [...] Read More
Checking and repairing mysql replication automatically
Tweet Hello! MySQL replication has been known to easily break, as a result of a large multitude of potential causes. Sometimes the replication can even break if an erroneous query is executed on the master server. With all the potential issues that may break replication, we thought it prudent to write an automated check script [...] Read More
Clone a XEN VPS server that resides on a LVM / Logical Volume Manager
Tweet Hello! We thought it would be important to share this information as it might be interesting to someone who wants to replicate the same VPS across many instances in order to create a farm of web servers (for example). This uses very similar concepts to our LVM XEN backup post a while back. Step [...] Read More
Linux VPS, Virtual Hosting, XEN VPS Hosting, CPanel VPS Hosting or Managed Hosting Services
Tweet Hey there, Before I update regarding my continued experiences with Xen, KVM, Varnish, FreeBSD and all the other (exciting) things that I do, I thought I’d remind anyone here who is looking for linux vps hosting, virtual hosting or specifically xen vps hosting or even cpanel vps hosting to check out our company website [...] Read More
Varnish Caching with Joomla
Tweet Hello There! One of the exciting new technologies to come out in the last few years is a tremendously efficient and dynamic caching system called Varnish (see : http://www.varnish-cache.org). We have been employing the use of Varnish for high traffic websites for the purposes of user experience improvements as well as for redundancy and [...] Read More
50% off any hosting plan for the first THREE months!
Tweet We are excited about a new promotion for our web hosting catalog here at *.hosting. We are offering a 50% discount for ANY of our SHARED or VPS hosting plans for the first 3 (thats THREE) months!!!! Simply enter the following promotional code during the signup process : SDH50OFF2010 It’s that simple! The 50% [...] Read More
Migrate from Linux to Xen with Rsync
Tweet I decided to write this little guide to provide the relatively simple steps needed to migrate your linux system to a Xen (HVM) virtual instance. It is assumed that on your source and destination boxes, that you only have one root “/” partition. If you partitioned out your file system differently, you will have [...] Read More
Foundry Load Balancers HTTP sticky sessions
Tweet This post is intended to be a general guide for configuring “stickied” load balanced HTTP servers. Whether it’s F5 load balancers, foundry load balancers or open source based load balancers (keepalived/lvs), the concepts are the same and can be migrated across said platforms. If you have a paid of foundry’s and are looking to [...] Read More
Hosting Coupon : 60% off the first month for ANY plan!
Tweet Hello there, Just thought I’d share an exclusive coupon / discount for all of our shared / vps hosting plans that allows for 60% off the first month of hosting fee’s : COUPON CODE : SDHTWT2010 Take a look at our main site for plan details. This coupon expires and there is only a [...] Read More
How to backup Xen with Logical Volume Mounts ; Works with HyperVM, SolusVM, FluidVM and More
Through our research and implementation of many Xen environments, it has become necessary to develop a reliable and secure method for backing up our Xen instances that are mounted on Logical Volumes (LVM). Read More
Migrate FreeBSD to Xen
There seems to be a lot of tutorials with respect to how you can dump/restore FreeBSD implementations. However, none of them appear to be all encompassing what is actually required from start to finish during the entire process. Read More
Compress files and folders over the network without using rsync
The following command ssh's to your remote server, tar + gzips a directory, and then outputs the compressed stream to your local machine. Read More
Script to distribute SSH Keys across many servers
The idea behind this script is to have a centralized, highly secure and restricted key repository server. Each server in your environment would run this script to "pull" the updated key list from the central server. The script would run as a cron job and can run as often as you like. Ideally every 5-10 minutes would allow for quick key updates / distribution. Read More
Setup Up Exim with ClamAV and Spamassassin
I decided to post this article on implementing a simple single mail server with anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities. This guide hopefully will help you on your way to configuring a basic mail system on Linux (specifically Debian). Read More
ProFTPD with MySQL Authentication
Since this setup uses one FTP account to create user home directories and upload files, a compromise to this FTP user would cause the attacker to gain access to all FTP user home directories. Read More
Generate a self-signed SSL Certificate with OpenSSL
Generating a self-signed certificate may be an easy task for the intermediate or senior level admin, however we decided to post this guide for everyone to use, since using the guide as a reference may hopefully be useful to those of you out there Read More
Manage Nagios with Scripts
Tweet Working at many different organisations over the past 10 years, I have been involved in the implementation and maintenance of many different monitoring implementations. These include commercial and open source implementations, such as : - Nagios - IP Monitor - Uptime - OpenNMS - Zabbix Although Nagios may not be the most scalable or [...] Read More
MySQL Replication : Replicating an existing database
I decided to make a revised post detailing the different steps required in order to implement a master / slave replication relationship within two or more MySQL servers. Read More