You choose your Private Cloud technology, we deploy it for you

The open-source Cloud Computing set of software has grown greatly over the last few years, to the point where we don’t want to be the ones that have to determine what cloud computing a customer would like to or needs to use.

So we “open the floor” to cloud computing customers who may want to use a particular type of open-source based cloud computing management or operations software.

Software like this includes; Eucalyptus, oVirt, Xen, KVM, other Hypervisors, Open Stack, Nimbula, Scalr, Open Nebula, and many others.

We started using Eucalyptus many years ago and it’s the underlying basis for some of our Cloud offerings, and we’ve used Xen, KVM and other Hypervisors for even longer and now we’re testing Open Stack and Scalr, with more to follow.

So if you have a Cloud rollout or deployment, and you want to use open-source software for managing and interfacing with your cloud infrastructure, then we can get that cloud software online for you, either on our hardware platforms, or on a dedicated colocated hardware in our racks in Sydney or Canberra, Australia, or remotely on your own hardware platforms where-ever they may be.

Pricing is flexible and variable depending on the software and hosting platform required, but we’re Open Source Experts and can deploy this capability quickly for you in any combination of hosting solution required.

Please feel free to contact us for more information or a firm quote on your cloud infrastructure requirements, regards,
Richard.

Posted in Network Presence | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Weekly Tweets for 2012-03-25

  • . @shiftyjelly as you know "The Honour is to Serve" & we welcome your 10th VPS! Congratulations http://t.co/TyjlrvA7 for your excellent Apps #
  • IAP (In App Purchases) seems to be the way to make money developing Apps!? http://t.co/trb3gXg2 ARPU is King & App Store is mostly for Games #
  • RT/NOTE: All customers running Windows based VPS are reminded of this recent critical RDP alert from Microsoft http://t.co/Dsmautcu #NetPres #
  • Good insight & graphs of Linux Kernel Performance & metrics, with how-to & covering common areas tuned for performance http://t.co/rWZ13jPj #

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. @shiftyjelly as you know “Th…

. @shiftyjelly as you know “The Honour is to Serve” & we welcome your 10th VPS! Congratulations http://t.co/TyjlrvA7 for your excellent Apps

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Upgrading to PHP 5.3 on CentOS 5.x Linux

Some of the earlier CentOS/RHEL version 5.x Linux distributions came with older PHP versions (like 5.1 etc) and many newer PHP based open-source software distributions (eg: latest WordPress) require the better and newer versions of PHP like 5.3 or higher, so here’s some quick commands to run as root on a CentOS 5.x operating system to upgrade its PHP version to 5.3.x
Do note that this does require installing the Fedora “EPEL” Repository to gain access to the newer PHP Packages.

First, shutdown any running software that’s using PHP, mostly this is the Web Server:

service httpd stop

Then due to nasty RPM dependencies (particularly if you have the frequently used ‘phpMyAdmin’ software installed), we recommend that you remove all currently installed PHP software packages, which can be identified and then removed with the following commands:

yum list installed | egrep ^php
yum remove php php-cli php-common php-gd php-ldap php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mysql php-pdo

Then install the equivalent new PHP packages from the EPEL Repository, installing that Repo file first, with the following commands:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
rpm -i epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
yum install php53 php53-cli php53-common php53-gd php53-ldap php53-mbstring php53-mcrypt php53-mysql php53-pdo

All done, so now restart the Web Server (Apache in this example) with:

service httpd start

And check the Apache web server logs to see that it’s running Ok with the new PHP, eg: tail /var/log/httpd/error.log

FYI,
Richard.

Posted in Network Presence | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Firewalls for Customers on our VPS & Networks

Some customers would like Firewalls around their VPS or Colocation hosts and networks, we know, but they don’t know who to ask to get them setup or how to go about it, so we’ve created a few simple Plans for “Customer Firewalls” for Network Presence customers.

It’s as easy as being Firewall Rules for $2 / Rule / month, min. spend of $12 / month, for Firewalls that “Allow a Few Ports, then Block the Rest”. Of course as part of that we’ll help you craft those Firewall Rules to deliver the protection you’d like for your site or servers hosted within Network Presence.

We also know that there’s customers that want to have just a few ‘ports’ opened and those that want to be “mostly open, few filtered” TCP or UDP ports and we can accomodate that too, as listed in the following.

Rules may look like:

a) Baseline Web Server, no SSL, just “port 80”

Allow Port 80 sessions from the Internet
Block anything else

That’s 2 Rules, min. spend of $12 / month.

b) Commerce Web Server, including SSL

Allow Port 80 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 443 sessions from the Internet
Block anything else

That’s 3 Rules, at $2 / Rule it’s under the min. spend of $12 / month.

c) Business Server, Web and Email

Allow Port 80 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 443 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 25 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 110 (POP3) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 995 (POP3S) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 143 (IMAP) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 993 (IMAPS) sessions from the Internet
Block anything else

That’s 8 Rules and at $2 / Rule it’s also under the min. spend of $16 / month.

d) Business Server, Web, FTP, Email and CMS

Allow Port 80 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 443 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 25 sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 110 (POP3) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 995 (POP3S) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 143 (IMAP) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 993 (IMAPS) sessions from the Internet
Allow Port 8080 (custom CMS) sessions from a single host on the Internet (1 rule)
Allow FTP sessions from 2 hosts on the Internet (2 rules)
Allow CMS custom port sessions from 2 hosts on the Internet (2 rules)
Block anything else

That’s 15 Rules and at $2 / Rule it’s $30 / month.

The advantage of the way that we do our Firewalls is that you need to enable a “Port or Service” (eg: Port 8080 of a CMS or “Mail” (being POP/POP3S/IMAP/IMAPS)) for it to be accessible, so by default your IP address becomes “unaccessible” from outside of Network Presence.

Inside of Network Presence though you can continue to access your Firewalled site and IP address. This is deliberate, in that we recommend that you have an EveryNet ADSL connection to the Internet, which brings you into Network Presence’ network perimeter and inherently better access to services hosted by Network Presence.

If you want “Block a Few then Allow All” type Firewalls then we can do that too, but it’s a different Firewall methodology in that it logs exceptions and it’s priced accordingly slightly higher than the ‘permit a few, deny the rest’ being $3 / Rule, like the following templates. It’s as easy as being Firewall Rules for $3 / Rule / month, min. spend of $20 / month. We’ll help you craft those Firewall Rules to deliver the protection you’d like for your site or servers hosted within Network Presence.

a) Internet server only for our Office on a Static IP ADSL/NBN/Internet service

Allow new Port 80 sessions from the Internet into the IP address of the Office and Count them (2 Rules)
Allow new Port 443 sessions from the Internet into the IP address of the Office and Count them (2 Rules)
Block un-connected TCP packets from the Internet into the IP address of the Office (1 Rule)
Allow anything else (1 Rule)

That’s 6 Rules, at $3 / Rule means that it’s at the min. spend of $20 / month for “Block Some, Allow Most”.

b) Internet Server to the Internet, just a few exceptions

Block new Port 8080 sessions from the Internet except for our 3 Static IP Addresses (4 Rules)
Log Exceptions to that port 8080 access (1 Rule)
Allow new Port 443 sessions from the Internet into the IP address of the Office and Count them (3 Rules)
Block un-connected TCP packets from the Internet into the IP address of the Office (1 Rule)
Allow anything else (1 Rule)

That’s 10 Rules, at $3 / Rules means $30 / month for that sophisticated Firewall

All in all, we have two Firewall Plans, one that’s “block some, allow all” and another that’s “allow a few, block the rest” and they’re available to any customer within the Network Presence network and billed directly by Network Presence. There’s also a customer-maintained web based interface to updating the Firewall Rules, so there’s minimal need to contact us for you to update your Firewalls yourself.

Please contact us to discuss your Firewall requirements, regards,
Richard.

Posted in Network Presence, Sales | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Creating a SSL Key & CSR

All done with a single command and then working through the interactive prompts and no password is mandatory, so you can just press the ‘enter’ key at the Key Password prompts..

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout SERVERNAME.key -out SERVERNAME.csr

If you want to create a Key and CSR using the “SHA2” or SHA256 encryption, add the “-sha256” parameter to the above openssl command-line.

Viewing a Certificate’s details with info from http://www.madboa.com/geek/openssl/#cert-exam

CSR Info is viewed via this command line:

openssl req -in FILE.csr -noout -text

Certificate Info is viewed via this command line:

openssl x509 -text -in FILE.crt

If you want to convert a .pfx file to a .key file, use:

openssl pkcs12 -in SERVERNAME.pfx -nocerts -nodes -out SERVERNAME.key

To convert from a PEM based or PCKS7 (.p7b) Cert file (with its key) to the .pfx format single file, use:

openssl pkcs7 -print_certs -in NAME.p7b -out NAME.cer
openssl pkcs12 -export -in NAME.cer -inkey NAME.key -out NAME.pfx

More information and details will be posted to this blog entry over time..

Here’s good openssl CSR generation info for EV based Certs in 2015: https://certsimple.com/blog/openssl-csr-command

FYI,
Richard.

Posted in Network Presence | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

IAP (In App Purchases) seems t…

IAP (In App Purchases) seems to be the way to make money developing Apps!? http://t.co/trb3gXg2 ARPU is King & App Store is mostly for Games

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Weekly Tweets for 2012-03-18

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RT/NOTE: All customers running…

RT/NOTE: All customers running Windows based VPS are reminded of this recent critical RDP alert from Microsoft http://t.co/Dsmautcu #NetPres

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Good insight & graphs of L…

Good insight & graphs of Linux Kernel Performance & metrics, with how-to & covering common areas tuned for performance http://t.co/rWZ13jPj

Posted in Tweets | Comments Off on Good insight & graphs of L…