Managing Consultants Access To Your Servers
Posted 20 Mar 2013, 10:36 am in How-To, Security
It's fairly common to hire an outside consultant to set up something on your server. After all, no one is an expert at everything! It may be a paid consultant, or perhaps just an acquaintance from a forum or IRC channel who has offered to help you with a configuration problem. Usually, this means that they need root access, and in most cases, the simplest way to do this is to give them your root password. This by itself is generally not a problem - you trust them to not destroy your server. The real threat, however, is not from the person you trust - it's from anyone else who might get their hands on your root password. I was inspired to write this short article based on what I've observed in a thread on Web Hosting Talk about a rootkit that is currently making the rounds on Linux boxes. Specifically, this post and this post seem to indicate that the initial unauthorized access that lead to the rootkit being installed their particular machines was a result of a consultant/third party contractor's computers being keylogged.
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How To Handle Planned Downtime
Posted 14 Jan 2013, 12:16 am in How-To
Maintenance is an unfortunate fact of life in the server industry. Usually, maintenance is planned ahead of time, and only takes a few minutes. But occasionally, there's a need for longer outages. One interesting case in particular is the case of BuyVM's upcoming move from San Jose to Las Vegas, which I mentioned in my review. This maintenance will unfortunately affect my most heavily trafficked sites, but fortunately, presents the perfect opportunity for me to figure out what to do when presented with a long, planned outage. Unfortunately, every server's configuration is different, so it's impossible to write a step-by-step copy and paste guide for this. I'll be discussing the general process along with any issues to watch out for, and hopefully you can adapt this guide to your situation.
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BuyVM Review
Posted 28 Dec 2012, 9:36 pm in Reviews
Considered by many to be pioneers in the low end VPS market, BuyVM offers OpenVZ and KVM based virtual private servers starting as low as $15 per year (OpenVZ 128MB). They also offer a Storage VPS product, available with up to 2TB of storage. BuyVM has servers in both San Jose, California and Buffalo, New York, so they're able to serve not only US-based customers well, but also Asia, Australia, and Europe too. Other additional services provided by BuyVM include DDOS protected IP addresses available for an additional fee, a shared MySQL database server that you can access for $1 per month, and free backup space and DNS hosting. I purchased my first BuyVM VPS (an OpenVZ 128) a little less than a year and a half ago, and over the course of that time, I've picked up 8 more, ranging from the $15/year plans to a 512MB KVM VPS, for a total of 9 VPSes. From that fact alone, it should be pretty easy to tell that I'm a fan.
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ServerDragon (a.k.a. SecureDragon) Review
Posted 14 Dec 2012, 9:17 am in Reviews
SecureDragon is a Florida-based hosting provider offering Virtual Private Servers (OpenVZ and KVM), cPanel shared hosting, and VPN services. They also have a Backup VPS offering, which offers large amounts of disk space, designed specifically for storing backups. In operation since October 2010, they recently celebrated their second birthday. I've had a VPS from them for about one year now, and I thought it was time that I gave them a thorough review. In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to mention that in addition to the one VPS that I pay for, they have also provided me with a small Xen-based virtual private server to use for testing OpenStatus, free of charge. This review is based on only my experience with their OpenVZ offering.
In the year that I've had my VPS with SecureDragon, I've experienced very little downtime. I did in fact experience downtime last night, lasting approximately 3 hours, but this is certainly not the norm for SecureDragon, and in this case it was mostly beyond their control, as they explained in the Reason For Outage that they posted shortly after restoring service. Aside from this single incident, I can't recall any significant downtime, other than for scheduled maintenance, which I was always notified of well ahead of time.
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5 Vital Pieces of Information When Asking for Help
Posted 3 Dec 2012, 8:04 am in How-To
I participate in a few technical forums. They're a great place to get ideas, and a great place to get help too. I like to help answer questions when I can, because I believe in the "Today you, tomorrow me" philosophy. I never know when I'm going to run into a problem that I can't solve, and I hope that if I do ask for help, someone will be there to help me some day. It's also good for building my own skills, since I often come across problems that I haven't seen before, but likely have the base knowledge necessary to fix.
But one of the biggest problems I run into when I stumble across someone asking for help is a lack of information. It's usually not enough to say "I can't get (insert software package here) to work. Help!". In most cases, more information is needed. A lot of time is wasted with people having to ask questions like "What Linux distro are you using?", "Are there any error messages?" and "What have you tried to do to fix the problem?". So, I've put together this short guide about what information to provide when asking for help, with the hope that it cuts down on the back and forth and gets people's problems solved quicker.
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