Seeksadmin Blog

This is just an update to notify all clients that we are currently having temporary network issues connecting to certain servers. We are working with Softlayer to solve this issue. It has been reported to us that this is an issue with Iternap and effects some in and outbound routes to their Washington Datacenter where our servers are located.

During this time there may be some issues in responding to downed servers and services. We do apologise for this. If you have any issues please create a ticket.

We appreciate your patience and will update you once this has been solved.

[UPDATE 2nd September 21:44 GMT (15.44 CST)]

This has now been solved. Internap have shut down their peering loop with Cox communications and this has solved the issue. If we have any more updates we will update you

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (August 21, 2008) – SeeksAdmin (http://www.seeksadmin.com), the industry leader in outsourced technical support, server administration, and fully managed services, announced today the launch of its United States based technical support team, offering round-the-clock outsourced end-user technical support and server administration.

Based in New York City, the United States technical support team operates 24/7/365 and is comprised of highly qualified technicians, boasting a range of certifications including RHCE, MCSE, A+ Linux, and a variety of hardware and network certifications. The team specializes in server security, server optimization, database restores and troubleshooting, code troubleshooting, compiling and configuring software, fixing control panel issues, and solving end user problems.

“By adding a team in the United States, we are able to provide a high-end option for transparent outsourced technical support. For many Web hosts and Internet Server Providers, customer support is ultimately their key selling point, and it is imperative their support representatives are not only knowledgeable and trained, but as importantly, courteous and respectful to the concerns of customers,” said Steven Clarke, CEO of SeeksAdmin. “We go the extra mile, and our customers know it.”

SeeksAdmin is unique in its personal approach to customer support. It provides end-users with direct chat and telephone accessibility to the technicians working on their ticket. Through its rigid Service Level Agreement (SLA), SeeksAdmin guarantees top-notch and timely technical support for virtually all problems, large and small. Most problems are resolved within a maximum of 30 minutes – a rare feat in the outsourced support market. SeeksAdmin also maintains support teams overseas, in the United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan.

In addition to transparent technical support, SeeksAdmin provides Linux administration and a variety of other managed services.

To learn more about United States based outsourced support from SeeksAdmin, please visit http://seeksadmin.com/outsourced_support_usonly.html.

To learn more about Linux administration, please visit http://seeksadmin.com/administration_server_usonly.html

About SeeksAdmin
A leader in outsourced technical support and server administration, SeeksAdmin serves hundreds of businesses internationally across a broad range of industries. With support offices in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, and now New York City, SeeksAdmin offers a competitive edge for its clients.

Well here I was thinking about the topic I should blog about. I was so desperate for a topic I even asked a few clients and thankfully Moris gave me an idea. He wanted me to write an article for AMD vs Intel, however in my opinion that is hardware related and is something more related to a hardware website. Not to mention the fact that I don’t actually think I would be able to write that much on that topic…. Well anyway it got me thinking about hardware and that is how I got to this topic.

We get a lot of requests each week asking for advice on server hardware and what the server hardware should be. So that is the topic of this article and I hope that you find it useful.

Main Considerations

When thinking about a new server the main thing that you should be thinking about is the type of site you run and what resources it uses the most of. That is whether it’s database intensive, has a lot of visitors, or its a shared host.

CPU

In this part of this blog I could go into the differences between AMD and Intel; however, I will try to keep away from that argument,  I will give you what I personally think and what many people in the industry think. That is that Intel currently have the edge over AMD on higher end processors and because of this in most cases I recommend that you go for an Intel processor.  Now the question is what clock speed and how many cores should it have? Well that deeply depends on the type of task you want it to complete.  For a VPS you will want more cores and processors as you will be sharing these out, and for a shared hosting site you will want a reasonable amount. You should concentrate on clock speed if you are planning to have a large number of processes which is common on application servers or on some database servers.

It is obviously hard to give you an exact guide on which CPU you need however hopefully I can give you a few things to think about. If you have any questions or want some help with exact specifications please feel free to drop sales an email for a free consult.

As a quick summary below are the rough specifications that you will need for certain types of servers:
Shared/Reseller Hosting:  Single/Dual Woodcrest 2Ghz
VPS Hosting: Dual Clovertown/Harpertown
Database: Singe Clovertown

RAM

Ram is always an interesting issue as you need as much as you need and it depends on server configuration,  the type of sites/application running on the server and the configuration of the server.  So this is one thing that you will need to keep an eye on, however in this day and age 2GB RAM is the minimum I would advise for a server. You need to keep checking on your free memory and make sure you have at least  a couple of hundred MB of memory free.

I will again write a semi-summary of what I believe is needed:
Shared/Reseller Hosting: 4GB minimum
VPS Hosting: 8GB minimum
Database Hosting: 4GB minimum

Hard drive

Now this is the interesting part and there are so many possibilities. In most cases you will be fine with a normal 7500rpm hard drive, however if you are expecting to do a lot of reads then a faster hard drive may be better.

In general for database servers you will want a much faster hard drive, normally I would advise the SA-SCSI hard drives for database servers. This will offer much better performance and will speed up the server more than a faster CPU and RAM will do.

Then you come on to RAID and all the different types. I just thought I would give a quick summary of the main types of RAID and what they do.

Raid 0 - This is a stripped disk array and will provide an I/O improvement . It requires at least 2 drives and the result would be the hard drives appear to be joined. We recommend this for gaming servers and high volume websites.

Raid 1 - This is a mirroring array and provides high performance, as its able to perform 2 separate reads or writes per mirrored pair. This is a full redundancy array and we would recommend it for any website that requires on the fly backup. However I would not suggest that you use this as your only backup.

Raid 5 - This requires a minimum of 3 drives. A Raid 5 array offers highest data transaction Read rate, medium data transaction Write rate and good cumulative transfer rate.I would recommend this for high volume MySQL based sites

Raid 10 - Raid 10 includes high Reliability and performance embedded in a single RAID controller. The minimum requirement to form a RAID level 10 controller is 4 data disks. This solution is good for all sites, as the increased reliability

Picking a server can be a daunting task for anyone and I hope this guide has made it easier for you. I wish I could give a personalized guide to you but I believe that I have given a rough guide that should cover most bases. Feel free to ask any questions that you come up with and hope you enjoyed the blog

For those of you that visited Hostingcon 2008 I’m quite sure you are already aware of the motorcycle giveaway. For everyone else, we here at SeeksAdmin liked the idea of giving away the opportunity to win a great big ticket item at Hostingcon and we jumped on the opportunity to help sponsor Ping!Zine, which I’m glad we did. Unfortunately, we waited a bit too long to make a decision on exhibiting at Hostingcon 2008 and by the time we decided to move forward with it it was too late in the game to have done everything properly. While it was not our home base, Ping!Zine certainly made us feel welcome in their space.

I’ve bumped into a few blog and forum posts on the net that complained about the outcome of the giveaway. To those of you that were not satisfied and/or pleased with the results I do apologize that it did not meet you expectations. We’ll make up for that next year! I fully support the giveaway and disagree with all claims that it was a scam. The contents rules and regulations where posted right on the table next to the entry box. I know we here at SeeksAdmin were were excited for someone to walk away with the Harley and was slightly disheartening when no one won. We had a blast though, and would certainly back Ping!Zine in the future.

Be sure to look for us at Hostingcon 2009! We made sure to register with iNet as soon as we could at the convention. We’ll be there and we’re planning on giving away something BIG next year with a GUARANTEED WINNER! I figure if we can avoid the fine print altogether everyone will be a lot happier with the outcome.

Thank you again Keith, Mindy & the whole Ping!Zine Team.

Can’t wait to meet everyone at Hostingcon 2009!

Well HostingCon came and went, and as it is my resolution to keep this blog updated I know that I should write a little about it. I personally did not manage to go to HostingCon due to some meetings and management issues that were arranged during the time, not to mention that it was my girlfriend’s birthday so on a personal level I am not sure I would have been able to get away with it. None-the-less we had some of our US staff members on show, and walking around. That is my Partner Steven, and our sales staff members, Zach and Soliel.

As some of you know, we sponsered the Harley contest, which was my last blog post. So I think I will start off with some photos of that beast. It definetly got some attention which was great.

As can be seen here, is the Harley, and of course we had to get in the Seeksadmin banner behind it. Doesn’t it look sexy? and the bike too. This exhibit definetly got some attention which was great.

This being our first HostingCon we have taken away a lot of plans for what to do next year. I would like to say that it was great to meet some of our customers, and have a nice talk. Its always nice to put some faces to names, and it was a great experience. For those of you who didn’t go to HostingCon I am sorry that we were not able to meet and below is an image of two of our staff members with two of Softlayers (Sorry Amanda and Arielle).

From Left to right: Steven, Arielle, Soliel, Amanda

For those of you who have not seen enough you can access our full photo album here.

Seeksadmin HostingCon 08 Images

Once again thanks to everyone we met, and everyone at hostingCon to help make the event so fun! See you next year!

Harley-Davidson motorcycles (popularly known as “Harleys”) have a distinctive design and exhaust note. They are especially noted for the tradition of heavy customization that gave rise to the chopper-style of motorcycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley-Davidson

Yes Harleys are one of the best motorcycles in the world. No matter what type of bike you like from sporting to touring, you will have heard of Harley Davidsons and now the best part of this is that you can win one!!!! Yes thats right, I am not just going on a random ramble, Seeksadmin is sponsering PingZine to give you the opportunity to win of these things.

If you want more details just email sales or come and visit us at the PingZine booth. We also have a lot of other goodies to give away from T-Shirts to pens. We also have special offers, however if you are a current customer or a prospective customer we would love to meet you!!!!

With the growth of the internet also came the growth of hacking. It has increased so much so that according to Zone-H there are over 2,500 recordered hacks each day. Some people may be suprised by this figure, others wont be. In my opinion that is not the suprising fact, the shocking fact is that the number of reported hacks is growing by 40% each year!!! Are the hackers getting smarter?

Generally the hackers will get in due to one of three reasons:

1. Out of date scripts - Everything from Kernels to Apache have updates and a lot of these updates are to fix security bugs. So if you are running out of date scripts with known security holes. A lot of hackers will take advantage of these holes and gain root access to your server
2. Insecure Scripts - Most of the hack attempts that we have to deal with at Seeksadmin are due to insecure scripts such as PHPbb, Vbulliten or many other common scripts. If these are not kept up to date they are very dangerous allowing a hacker to gain root access.
3. Insecure Passwords: Not much explanation is needed, if you have a short or weak password it is easier to guess and it can easily be brute forced.

So what can you do? Well keep everything up to date, and use a decent password? It wont ensure that you are 100% secure however it will go a long way to stopping you being hacked.

At the moment Seeksadmin is concentrating on security and we are trying to raise awareness in security and how to keep your system secure. In accordance with this we are offering a FREE remote scan and a $5 local scan. After these scans you will recieve the security holes in your system and we will reccomend a few things you can do to help secure your system. We also have free security consultation so if you have any questions please contact us at sales[@]seeksadmin[dot]com

Well in the past few months I have really wanted to put an emphasise on selling some Fully Managed servers. There are a few reasons for this, firstly I have dealt with a lot of different data centers, and with a lot of clients and a lot of the time there is a lot of what I will call “lag” when it comes to us telling the client of a problem and when they tell the datacenter to fix it.

So why buy of Seeksadmin instead?

Well there are a few reasons for this, but effectivly by doing so you cut out the middle man and on a lot of that “lag” that may occour. If you have a problem and we need to contact the data center, we do it and we do not need to wait. This can stop major downtime as we can react instantly. This in itself is a major benifit as it can avert major disaster, but there is more.

We get our servers from the Softlayer datacenter located in Dallas, Texas. They are argubaly the best datacenter in the world at the moment. I have to admit at being one of Softlayers largest fans, this is because they are dedicated to their clients and are always updating their services and technology. For more information just read my review which is in this blog, I dont want to clog this post up with to much about them. Anyway, I did have a point, and that is that all our staff members have worked with and know the Softlayer system and staff. This means if your server doesnt boot or you forget your password, we can immeditialy get the server up in single-user mode and sort the problem instantly.

The last advantage is probably the smallest one, and that is that it makes your bill management easier and saves you the trouble of having to contact the datacenter. This may seem silly but in the busy world we live in those extra minutes (or hours) can be everything.

Management Portal
Before there was always one huge advantage of going with the datacenter instead of going with a reseller, and that was simple. The management portal where you can reboot, and manage your server. However we at Seeksadmin have spent a few months developing our own portal to provide you the ability to see your server stats, the hardware, the bandwidth usage and graphs, to allow you to reboot the server, to control the port speed and more. This has definetly been a major project and I am very proud of it having done a lot of the work myself.

Our portal gives you every feature you need and is on par with Softlayer’s own portal. We now provide every advantage and more of going with the datacenter. Our prices are equal to the datacenter and you also can get your management from us.

This is more of an unusual blog post from me, a bit of sales pitch here and I feel a bit like I have gone around in circles, and I am sorry for that, but I thought it was important to mention our new servers and also the portal. I will make anouther post in the coming days with screenshots of the portal and a full feature list, but for now I will keep you waiting just that bit longer

We have been quite busy behind the scenes making many improvements to our infrastructure and methods to ensure our current and future clients will have the best experience here at SeeksAdmin. Below you may find some of the updates!

New Services - We have added a few new services and modified some of the existing ones.

• • Full & base server administration services are now backed with a money back guarantee. One hour response time guaranteed for full and two hour for base.
  • Outsourced support is now readily available to all prospective clients, with many dedicated staff member available for hire.
  • Our 911 Service now provides clients with immediate access to a SeeksAdmin server administrator to fix emergency situations.
  • SeeksAdmin has also partnered with some great vendors to provide you with affordable solutions to assist your business. More can be seen on our additional services page.

Monitoring System Redone…

Well, not exactly redone, but even better. We have decided to scrap the system we were using for monitoring as it was producing far too many false positives among other things. SeeksAdmin will now be providing all its server administration and monitoring subscribers with HyperSpin monitoring!

All new accounts will be setup by default with a HyperSpin monitoring account. Current clients are being migrated and will be updated once their account has been moved.

Payments Made Easy - We’d like to make it as easy as possible for all of our clients and prospective clients to pay for their invoices. We now accept credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex), paypal, e-gold, moneybookers, and mail-in money order & checks.

Website Redone - Some of our clients were getting lost with our previous design. We’ve redesigned our website to make it more appealing to the viewers eyes and make information easier to find. We find it to be a great step in the right direction considering where we’ve come from:

SoftLayer Portal Access - Our managed dedicated server clients will now have complete access to stats and reboot functions of the SoftLayer server portal via our custom panel that taps into their powerful api system.

Client & Support System Migration - To take advantage of some more powerful features offered by the Kayako helpdesk system we are migrating our support to a new helpdesk system. Clients will still be able to easily email support tickets to us and check the status of their tickets online. Should you need any assistance working around the new systems contact support.

SeeksAdmin is making improvements everyday. If you have any suggestions, feel free to drop us a line. Be sure to look out for our affiliate program, coming soon.

There are a few ways to sort server security, but one of the major ways to harden your server is to secure SSH. On a default machine you login as root directly, on the default port. This means you are susceptable to brute force and all other sorts of attacks. What I am going to write about is a short and simple guide about how to secure your SSH and what this does. You dont have to do all of these allthough I would deeply reccomend doing the steps below.
1. Changing SSH Protocol

I guess a good place to start would be what are the differences between the two SSH protocols (1 and 2), as not many people know this. You dont need to know, but I think that you should know the reasons you are doing this. I will try to cut the crap out of it and keep it simple. Basically SSH2 uses seperate protocols for transport, authentication and connections, splitting all your data up making it just that little bit more secure. It also has stronger cryptographic integrity checks and has better encryption. Basically what I am trying to say (but in tech talk) is that this is one change you should always make. Now lets get on to making the change.

Step 1) Use nano, pico or vi (your favourite text editor) to open up /etc/ssh/sshd_config for editing

Step 2) Find the Line #Protocol 2,1

Step 3) Uncomment the line and change it to

Protocol 2

2. Changing the SSH port

This is what we like to call security by obscurity, it is one extra thing the hacker has to guess before he can get in, although practically a port scan would be able to find the port. However i have found that changing the port does stop a lot of brute force attacks from occouring.

NOTE: Make sure you add the port you want to use to the firewall AND/or add yourself to the allow list so you can connect to the port and dont lock yourself out.

Step 1) Again open up /etc/ssh/sshd_config with your favourite editor

Step 2) Find the line #Port 22

Step 3) Uncomment the line and replace with the following (where port 2777 is a random, unused port)

Port 2777

NB: To find out if the port is being used use the comand lsof -i:portnumber eg lsof -i:2777

3. Disable Direct Root Login

Unlike the other steps we have used this requires a bit more than editing the config file, but its not hard so dont worry about it. Again this is a little of security by obscurity adding an extra layer the hacker/cracker has to get through if he wants access to your machine, making that bit harder.

A lot of other guides you will see will tell you to add a cPanel account etc etc, but lets just make it easier shall we.

Step 1) Type the following in SSH replacing username with a random username eg sekadmin

adduser sekadmin

Step 2) Now lets give sekadmin a password

passwd sekadmin

You will now be given a password prompt twice. Make sure the word is not a dictoinary word, I would reccomend looking at my password article for the best password.

Step 3) Now we need to give sekadmin, the correct privilages so he can su - to root.

Step 4) Open up /etc/group with your favourite text editor. Find the line that starts with “wheel” and add your username on at the end of the line. Then close and save the file.

Step 5) Now you will need to test the login works so create a NEW ssh session and try to connect using the username that you just created. Once logged in type “su -” and then the root password to see if that works. If it works everything went ok and you continue on to the next step

Step 6) Once again open up our favourite file /etc/ssh/sshd_config in your text editor

Step 7) Find the line #PermitRootLogin yes, uncomment it and change it to no.

Other Methods

There are also some other methods that you can use. One of the other methods I like to use is binding SSH to an IP. If you do this, the best thing to do is use a spare IP that is not being used by a website. This will offer the most security.

Anouther great thing to do is to disable password logins totally and use an ssh key. I will not write anything about that here, because it can be a blog post on its own for a rainy day

AFTER all changes

Just before I forget, to make all your changes take effect you will have to restart ssh

service sshd restart