3Tried to set up a new VPS last night — a Xen VPS with stock kernel 2.6.18. Picked Debian 5 Lenny as operating system, and then upgrade to Squeeze using apt-get dist-upgrade. Smooth sailing so far. Until I tried to pull some of the toolchains I was trying to build from a remote subversion repository. [...]
32 or 64 Bit for Your VPS?
There’s an interesting discussion on SliceHost forum that I spotted a while ago — “Might I have to say goodbye to Slicehost? (64-bit vs. 32-bit)”. Someone is thinking of leaving SliceHost because all its OS templates are running 64 bit Linux. That means your sizeof(long) and sizeof(void*) are now 8 bytes instead of 4, which [...]
Debian GNU/Linux 5 “Lenny” Released
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released: The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 5.0 (codenamed “Lenny”) after 22 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of twelve processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments. It also features [...]
Ubuntu Server Upgrade to 8.04 Hardy Heron
First of all I have to confess that I have been very busy over the last months or two and have not really been motivated to write. I have a few other projects happening at the same time — at work, at home, at church and at my other websites, and I apologise for neglecting [...]
Switched From Gentoo to Ubuntu
SliceHost 3-Way-Handshake Podcast Episode 8 — over 80% of Slice at SliceHost runs on Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu), verses around 5.5% for Gentoo. RPM-based distributions (CentOS, Fedora, etc) is a bit bigger but simply does not compare with overwhelming domination of Debian-based distributions. Over the last 3-4 months I have also gradually moved my Gentoo [...]
Linux vmsplice Local Exploit – How Hosts Responded
SecurityFocus: Linux kernel memory access vulnerabilities, exploit included to get you root account on stock kernels between 2.6.17 and 2.6.24.1. Web hosts responded — Holy !$#&!!! CentOS 5, Ubuntu Edgy-Gutsy, Debian Etch — all these Linux distributions are affected. Basically a local user can gain root access, and with help from vulnerable applications that allow [...]
Time to try Ubuntu?
I originally commented on Isabel Wang’s blog post on Ubuntu Linux and dedicated server providers, but somehow the comment disappeared. Hopefully it is not censorship in place :) So I am gathering my thoughts again, and will put them here. I am a long time Gentoo Linux man, which is not hard to figure out [...]
Secure Shell, the Linux Shared Hosting Essential
One of the first thing I look for in Un*x/Linux shared hosting is, whether the host provides Secure Shell (SSH) access. As the hosting market becomes more competitive, more and more budget hosts start to provide this feature. However, many, especially ones under big names like GoDaddy and Yahoo, do not offer this essential feature [...]
SSH Dictionary Attack Prevention with iptables
Last week (9-15 April). 8,750 failed SSH login attempt, averaging almost one per minute, trying out all kinds of possible user names and left tons of junk in my message log. The recent SSH brute-force attacks (actually it’s not that recent) are rather annoying, and this article at Whitedust.com has useful information on how to [...]