Dedicated Servers

Mastering Essential Server Management: Safeguarding, Backing Up, and Optimising Your Digital Fortress

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, effective server management stands as the cornerstone of maintaining a secure, responsive, and reliable online presence. Whether you’re a seasoned server manager or just starting, prioritising three key tasks can significantly impact your server’s performance and security. This blog post delves into these essential server management tasks, which every server manager should treat with utmost seriousness.

1. Ensuring Robust Security

Security breaches carry dire consequences, making server security a non-negotiable priority. Regular maintenance and updating of security measures are paramount to safeguarding your server and the sensitive data it houses.

  • Patch Management: Remain vigilant in applying security patches and updates to the server’s operating system, software, and applications. This fortifies potential vulnerabilities against exploitation by cybercriminals.
  • Access Controls and Firewalls: Implement stringent access controls to curtail unauthorised entry. Firewalls serve as the initial line of defence, sieving out malicious traffic and shielding your server from cyber threats.
  • Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS): Set up IDS to keep watch for and flag any suspicious activity in real-time, thereby providing timely alerts of potential breaches.

2. Data Backup and Recovery

No matter how secure your server is, unexpected data loss can rear its head due to hardware failures, mishaps, or human errors. A robust backup and recovery strategy serves as your safety net.

  • Scheduled Backups: Regularly back up critical server data, databases, configurations, and application settings. Automated backup schedules ensure data is protected without manual intervention.
  • Testing Restoration: Regularly test the restoration process to ensure backups are functional and data can be successfully retrieved.
  • Off-Site Backups: Maintain off-site backups to guard against physical disasters or breaches impacting the primary server location.

3. Performance Monitoring and Optimisation

A sluggishly performing server can vex users and taint your online reputation. Consistent monitoring and optimisation of performance guarantee a seamless experience for visitors.

  • Continuous Monitoring: Keep an eye on key performance metrics, including CPU usage, memory utilisation, disk I/O, and network traffic. Use monitoring tools to nab anomalies and detect potential issues early.
  • Resource Optimisation: Proactively tweak server resources, configurations, and settings to maintain peak performance. Tailor settings based on usage patterns to sidestep bottlenecks.
  • Problem Resolution: Swiftly address any performance issues identified through monitoring to uphold a responsive server environment.

Mastering these three vital server management tasks not only ensures a secure and dependable online presence but also underscores your commitment to offering users a seamless experience. By bolstering security, fortifying data backup procedures, and optimising performance, you’ll be primed to navigate the intricacies of server management in today’s dynamic digital sphere. Remember, a well-managed server forms the bedrock of a successful online venture, resilient against potential challenges.

Your Path to Effortless Server Management: Partner with UKC for Security, Performance, and Reliability

If managing your VPS or server is becoming a challenge, rest assured that you’re not alone. At UKC, we understand the complexities of server management and are here to lend a helping hand. Let us create a tailored plan for you, ensuring that your server is fortified with top-tier security measures, optimised for high performance, and backed up meticulously to safeguard against data loss. Your server’s well-being is our priority, and our expert team is ready to guide you toward a seamless and worry-free server management experience. Contact us today to explore how we can work together to elevate your server’s security, performance, and overall reliability.

UKC02 – Upgrade to Plesk Obsidian

Security, Performance and Feature Enhancements

We are pleased to announce that all hosting accounts that reside on UKC02 (Plesk 12) will be upgraded to the very latest Plesk Obsidian panel between 1800 Thursday 10th and 0400 Friday 11th December. There will be no disruption to your service.

Plesk Obsidian brings a whole suite of new features as well as the highest level of security and performance. In addition to the panel and base operating system upgrade your server hardware will be upgraded to the latest generation equipment thus delivering the highest performance for your web hosting services.

Access to the Plesk panel and the recommended name servers remain unchanged:

Panel access: https://ukc02.uk:8443
Nameserver 1: ns.ukc02.uk
Nameserver 2: ns2.ukc02.uk

The web server IP address will change from 195.224.99.180 to 195.224.99.182. If you use your own name servers (i.e. not the recommended name servers ns.ukc02.uk and ns2.ukc02.uk) then please ensure you change your DNS A records to use the new IP address within 7 days.

In the event that you have a problem with your web site service or you feel the migration of some of your data may need further attention please do not hesitate to contact the Helpdesk, advise of the specific problem you are experiencing and we will resync your data without delay.

We hope you enjoy the enhanced performance and security of your new UKC Plesk Obsidian Server.

UKC02 – Service Outage 16/12/2019

UKC02 – Service Outage Updates

Latest update 20:30 20th December

The Plesk Objects have been imported successfully, we are now running a number of tests on the Plesk services.

We will be bringing sites back online over the next 48 hours, this is a temporary solution, we will upgrade all accounts to Plesk Onyx after the festive period.

Plesk Onyx offers some of the latest features available with Plesk, such as PHP 7.3, LetsEncrypt, DNSSEC and webmail SSL support.

All domains using the following nameservers will automatically resolve at the new IP address once DNS propagation has completed:

ns.ukc02.uk
ns2.ukc02.uk

If you are using a third party DNS provider and are pointing A records at UKC02, please update all instances of the old IP address 5.77.35.132 to the new IP address 195.224.99.180 inside your DNS control panel.

Thank you very much for your patience throughout this difficult time.

How to fix: (98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80

sshApache Error: (98) Address already in use

Occasionally your VPS or dedicated server will just not play ball.

Whenever Apache gives up the ghost it usually a case of restarting the service and within seconds your sites are back online, as if nothing happened. Great!

# service httpd restart

Most of the time, this resolves the issue. But, on occasion, apache simply doesn’t want to play. The most common issue we hear about is the Address already in use issue, which looks something like this

# service httpd restart
Stopping httpd:                                            [FAILED]
Starting httpd: (98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs
                                                           [FAILED]

How to resolve this apache issue

Unless apache is restarting at the time you are trying to restart manually then what we have here is a locked process. Thankfully the resolution is quite simple. We just need to find the locked process, kill it then restart apache as usual.

Let’s find the locked process id

# netstat -ltnp | grep ':80'

This will return something like this

tcp  0  0 :::80  :::* LISTEN      3826/sudo

Now we have identified the PID as 3826, we just need to kill it

# kill -9 3826

With a little luck, a simple apache start will now get everything working

# service httpd start

Starting httpd: [  OK  ]

If the problem persists then review the apache error log to locate the issue:

# tail -500 /var/log/httpd/error_log

Protect against WordPress Pingback Vulnerability

How to Neutralise a Pingback DDOS Attack

sshThe WordPress Pingback Vulnerability is used to maliciously attack your WordPress site via the Pingback service.

If the attack is heavy enough then not only will your site be seriously slowed if not inaccessible) but your server will also be overloaded with requests thus risking your shared hosting account altogether.

This type of attack is usually instigated via a botnet of many hundreds (if not thousands) of different IP addresses so a simply blocking the IP address of the attacker is not practical.

If you are under attack right now then there are actions you can take to minimise (if not nullify) the effect of attack.

Disable the WordPress XMLRPC Service

We can do this by adding a “deny” to “xmlrpc.php” in your .htaccess file. This will disable the your WordPress site from participating with the pingback requests.

Add the following to the top of your .htaccess file:

<files xmlrpc.php>
order deny, allow
deny from all
</files>

The attack will now have less effect on your server load.

Once the attack is over, you may remove deny code if you need XMLRPC services active on your WordPress site. There’s a 95% chance you can leave it there with no noticeable effect at all.

Blocking the DDOS Attack using CSF

If you use CSF, you may still want to block the IP addresses of the attacking botnet. It’s quite easy to do.

Here is a bash one-liner that will do the job for you in real-time:

tail -f /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/logs/access_log | grep "\"WordPress/" | grep -v "POST " | awk '{print $1}' | while read IP; do /usr/sbin/csf -td $IP 7d BlockPingback; done

There is some satisfaction in having the IPs permanently blocked. You can add the resulting IP block to your deny files on all servers and accounts.

It does make sense as all the attacking WordPress sites are clearly compromised and will no longer be a problem (for you at least) if permanently blocked from your server.