This document is intended as a technical reference on what RimuHosting endeavors to provide with a base VPS installation. Before any control panels such as webmin or extra software has been installed.
If you are looking for a solid introduction on how to use your VPS take a look at our Orientation Guide
All our servers include direct ssh access out of the box, read further down for details on how to secure that. When you place a new order connection information is provided in our welcome email and Orientation guide linked above.
Additionally we also provide console access, which allows you to work on your VPS even when networking or ssh is unavailable on the VPS. Set this up in our customer portal.
Depending on your ssh setup, you may need to add options to your client to to facilitate connections. This permits older protocols which have been deprecated over time.
Example error:
no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss
Example options for openssl command line:
ssh -o PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa -o HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -o KexAlgorithms=+diffiehellman-group1-sha1 user@yourhost.com
By default, networking, sshd, syslog, postfix, and cron should all be running. There may be other always-on and on-demand services
Our standard images come with a key set of the most popular packages pre-installed. For example all our images have the distribution versions of Apache2, and Php/Python/Perl installed.
Postfix mail service is configured for local mail delivery. Thats is easy to tune by following our mail setup guide.
MySQL and Dovecot are included in the base image, but may not be enabled by default. If you needed any help starting those applications up, just let us know on your order or in a support ticket and we can take care of that for you.
The recommended way to manage which packages are installed, is to use the the distribution provided package management software (eg apt, yum, dnf, etc). It is always possible to setup and use the method you prefer separately.
You can generate a list of installed packages on your own server. For example on CentOS run 'rpm -qa | sort'. Or on Debian/Ubuntu run 'dpkg --get-selections | sort'.
By default, the VPS kernel lives on the host server 'outside' your VPS. So you will not see the binary files on your VPS. The kernels RimuHosting use do not have modules enabled. This improves security, and makes it easier to upgrade when newer kernels come out.
We provide recent long term support kernels built from kernel.org sources. And each kernel is tested to make sure it supports all our installable distros.
If you would like to manage your own kernel, including the capability to load modules, we also offer a PV-Grub option. You will find this option along with our standard external kernels as mentioned above, in our control panel here:
https://rimuhosting.com/cp/vps/kernel.jsp
For instructions on how to prepare your VPS for use with PV-Grub, please see the, PV-Grub page here.
Where possible we configure the use of local resources to reduce the effect of international latency. In many cases this also gives significant performance benefits.
We keep a script for each distribution that can be used to help configure our recommended defaults. Customers can review the exact 'Errata' script used for their installed distribution on the VPS status page.
SELinux and other security systems are not enforced in the kernels we build. We had found that some (older) distros do not boot when it is enabled. Also in the past we have enabled SELinux in the kernel on request. And then reverted back to the non-SELinux kernel when the customers found that was not as easy for them to use as they would have liked.
Our latest kernels should include what is needed to support profiles for SELinux, AppAarmour, and FIPs mode. To enable those (orr other solutions) just let us know to enable that.
If you need a profile our kernel doesnt include, consider using pvgrub with the distribution kernel instead.
Depending on your needs you may prefer to start with a smaller set of packages than what comes with our base image. Or just install packages and services yourself. We have found that minimal means pretty widely different things for different users so our base install is intended to cater for most of our users, and receives frequent testing and updates to ensure that works consistently.
The simplest way to customise a new install is to manually remove packages that are not needed. For example to remove LAMP packages on Debian you might run the following
apt-get purge apache2* libapache* php* mysql* mariadb*
apt-get autoremove
If you prefer something more specific, you mightwant to deploy a custom linux install of your own
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