• How many times your clients have asked you whether you are offering Managed VPSes ?
• How many times you wished you had QUALITY support team with you to offer 24/7 managed VPSes ?
• Do you realize your clients prefer to have the issues solved over LiveChat insted of opening a ticket ?
• Does your current support, provide with quality you wish to offer your clients ?

Through us, now you can!!! If you are someone who places quality of service over all, opt us. You will never regret the decision.

Maximum of 15 minutes response time and 6 hours resolution time – Best response times in the industry (delivered by a technical support firm). Average is far far below that – 5 mins response time and 45 mins resolution time.

Here is our VPS management offer details

• 24/7 Live Chat for you, the server owner (at no extra charge)
• 24/7 transparent support for end user – We login to your helpdesk and do the tickets
• 24/7 Proactive VPS node Monitoring
• 15 minutes guaranteed response time – Often a ticket is responded or resolved in 5 minutes time.
• 6 hours guaranteed resolution time – Often an issue is resolved in less than one hour time.
• Installation of 3rd Party Software/Scripts in the VPSes, as per your client requests
• Level 1, 2 and 3 Support
• We can provide Pre-Sales & Sales support too at this rate
• We monitor each VPSes inside the node as well (upto 20 VPSes and for 20+ VPSes monitoring is charged $3 per VPS)
• Level I,II & Sales Chat support for end user
• Firewall Installation and hardening of VPSes
• Reactive, regular updates for the VPSes
• Free setup of billing scripts and such for your VPS clients

Trust us! we really care for your clients. We take pride in the reviews they give for you here, while we remain anonymous to them.

With this plan, you just need to arrange for the backup space of the VPSes and start offering managed VPS very easily.

Pricing

One VPS node – $249 per month
2 – 5 VPS nodes – $229 per month
5 – 10 VPS nodes – $199 per month
10 – 20 VPS nodes – $179 per month
20+ VPS nodes – $149 per month

For order links, please contact our sales or chat us via IM.

Here is a brief of our other offers

24×7 Shared support – $999 per month (Live chat included + Unlimited tickets)
24×7 Dedicated support – $2999 per month (Live chat included + Unlimited tickets)

Till this offer lasts, we also offer dedicated Level III admin for just $1299 per month, while a semi-dedicated level III admin can be hired for just $799 per month.

With our dedicated staff,

• You can chat in person as if he is your hired employee
• 5-10 mins response times
• 10 mins – 3 hours resolution of issues
• Server monitoring
• Live chat
• Forum postings

And any customized requirements you would want (y)our staff to do.

For placing an order, please chat with us online from any of the instant messenger or Live Chat service provided to you from our website at http://www.supportsages.com or email sales [a][t] supportsages.com .

NB : SS supports all virtualization technologies and multi-platforms also.

IFS or Internal Field Seperator holds the value which seperates the various entities. This can be file names, values read into a script by read etc. It is the character or characters designated as whitespace by the operating system.

The IFS is set to the newline and space character. The global variable $IFS stores the value. To view the exact value stored in IFS execute:

echo "$IFS" | cat -vTE
 ^I$
$

Running echo “$IFS” will not give you any visible output (after all, you are going to see a space and a newline). cat -vTE displays non printable characters , tabs as ^I and ends each line with a $ sign.

In a script which utilises filenames (with spaces), it is always preferable to change the IFS to include only the newline character opposed to the default space and newline character. Lets check out one such script which accepts filenames wih spaces. This scripts simply prints the file names in your current directory. (Remember to create some files in your currenct directory which has spaces. You may try the same script removing the lines with the IFS variable in reference to see the difference)

#!/bin/bash
OIFS=$IFS # Original IFS

IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") # New IFS

for fil in $(ls -1 $PWD); do
	echo $fil
done

IFS=$OIFS # Restore earlier IFS

IFS can also be used to read files with lines sepearated by a special character. For example in the /etc/passwd, to store the various entries like username, homedirectory etc.

The following script uses the while construct to determine the users who have the shell portion as /bin/false

#!/bin/bash

OIFS=$IFS
IFS=':'

while read username password userid groupid comments homedir shell_avail
do
	if [[ $shell_avail == /bin/false ]]; then
                echo "$username has no shell"
        fi

done < /etc/passwd
IFS=$OIFS

In the above script each of the 7 portions of the /etc/passwd file is assigned to the 7 variables
username password userid groupid comments homedir shell_avail with the read command. The if portion in the script compares the seventh variable – shell_avail to /bin/false to determine the username and outputs it.

From now on you can use the IFS variable for all those files with spaces and extracting values separated by a special character.

Attackers after getting access to a server, will install a rootkit to hide their identity and run desired scripts anywhere within the server. It makes the life of a hacker easy once installed. Rootkits are not easily detectable. Sometimes, if the rootkit is one of the latest ones without a diagnosis, the server will have to be rebuild from scratch.

A rootkit will have multiple applications for cracking the entire server, some of them are:

Server Access Applications (Back door application)
These applications will create a backdoor to log in to the hacked system without using the exploit again.

Log clearing Applications
These applications clear the logs of the events performed by the hacker or the applications used. They all the associated log files in the server.

Packet sniffing Applications
These applications monitor the data through the various interfaces in the server at particular ports.

Malicious Scripts
Many scripts will be installed like IRC bots, ddos daemons, spam servers, trojans, worms etc.

There are mainly two kinds of root kits. The application rootkit and the kernel rootkit.

Application rootkits
These rootkits mimic a particular application and will hide the attackers files/processes from being revealed by the original application. To illustrate, a rootkit ls application will perform all the task of a normal ls but will not display any of the files of the attacker. Other application rootkits will create backdoors for unauthorised access, packet sniffers etc which go undetected or are hidden by renaming. Application rootkits are the most common.

Kernel rootkits
Kernel rootkits modify the kernel and apply patches to the kernel and device drivers. They also hide the applications and files of the attacker. As antivirus and other applications run beneath the kernel, they are the most undetectable rootkits.

‘Prevention is better than cure’ – as this saying goes, it is always better to keep the system secure and updated when ever possible to stop these installations. There are some applications which help detect any known rootkits running in the system. One such is the chkrootkit.

chkrootkit is one of the popular rootkit detectors (an anti-rootkit) and it is know to detect common rootkits on unix/linux servers. chkrootkit relies on basic string processing techniques to determine the presence of rootkits. It scans specific sytem files and binaries targeted by rootkits for known signatures.

The following are the instructions to install chkrootkit version 0.49 in a server.

cd /usr/local/

wget ftp://ftp.pangeia.com.br/pub/seg/pac/chkrootkit.tar.gz

wget ftp://ftp.pangeia.com.br/pub/seg/pac/chkrootkit.md5

md5sum -c chkrootkit.md5 # to check if the downloaded file is intact

tar -xzf chkrootkit.tar.gz

cd chkrootkit-0.49/

make sense

./chkrootkit

chkroootkit will check all the files and display the status of the files analysed. This information may be logged for future reference. For this a cron job may be setup to be run at least once a month.

Inserting an entry like the one below into the systems cron tasks (executed atleast once a month) will send the report of the chkrootkit vulnerabilities to the administrator conserned.

/usr/local/chkrootkit-0.49/chkrootkit | mail -s "chkrootkit report $(date +%d/%m/%y)" "admin@domain.com"

Avail this hot offer, before July 20th. Please also note that all these plans include LiveChat support as well.

On all our plans – we meet 15 mins response time and 6 hours resolution time. We are so much confident on our quality delivery that any ticket which doesn’t meet this response times and the resolution times will get 100% refund. With the semi & dedicated support, if we fail to meet the response time and resolution time for any more than 10% of tickets you get free support for the next month or 100% refund (if you decide to leave us)

Dedicated Support Staff

SupportSages is now offering Level I, 8*6 dedicated staff, for just $249 per month for the first three months after which, it will be $399 per month. Hired personnel will be completely dedicated to the success of your firm.

Our Level 1 dedicated admin staff can,

• Handle Level 1 chat support & level I and level II ticket support as well.

• Can monitor your servers during their shift, using our monitoring interface.

• Can handle billing & sales chat and desk as well.

• Do any duties assigned by you.

• Send in daily shift reports, in a format, preferred by you.

• Can do basic shell scripting

• Can do 20-40 Level I tickets or 10-20 Level II tickets or 1-5 Level III tickets a shift.

• Will be able to respond L1 and L2 tickets in less than 15 minutes.

Few words about our Level I staffs.

• Yes our intense training makes them do Level III tickets as well.

• Three Level 1 staffs are under direct supervision of a Level III admin.

• They are working towards Level II and industry certifications like RHCE, CCNA, MCSE etc as hard and smart as possible.

• Most importantly, they have the passion for what they do.

• Speak and write english as if it is their first language

• Hold bachelors or masters in computers.

L2 techs is available at $499 per month for the first three months – $749 from the fourth
L3 engineers is available at $999 per month for the first three months – $1499 from the next

24/7 Support Team

Semi-dedicated Support Team – $750 for the first three months – $1200 from the fourth.
Dedicated Support Team – $2250 for the first three months – $3600 from the fourth.

Per Server Support – This rate is per month & recurring!

1 server – $59 per server per month
2 servers – $89 per server per month
3-5 servers – $79 per server per month
5-10 servers – $69 per server per month
10+ servers – $59 per server per month

1 server and 10+ servers cost the same for you!!! What kind of offer is this eh ??? We want a starter to succeed too.

If you just want LiveChat support as well, please add $30 per server on the above rates. Please note that LiveChat support option for 1 server will invite the extra rate of $50 instead.

Details of this offer

24/7 Live Chat for you, the server owner (at no extra charge)
24/7 transparent support for end user – We login to your helpdesk and do the tickets
24/7 Proactive Server Monitoring
24/7 Server Management
15 minutes guaranteed response time – Often a ticket is responded or resolved in 7 minutes time.
6 hours guaranteed resolution time – Often an issue is resolved in less than one hour time.
Installation of 3rd Party Software/Scripts
Level 1, 2 and 3 Support
We can provide Pre-Sales & Sales support too at this rate
Australian dictionary for Oz clientele and US dictionary for US clientele (if you understand what we mean)

• How many times your clients have asked you whether you are offering Managed VPSes ?
• How many times you wished you had QUALITY support team with you to offer 24/7 managed VPSes ?
• Do you realize your clients prefer to have the issues solved over LiveChat insted of opening a ticket ?
• Does your current support, provide with quality you wish to offer your clients ?

Through us, now you can!!! If you are someone who places quality of service over all, opt us. You will never regret the decision.

Maximum of 15 minutes response time and 6 hours resolution time – Best response times in the industry (delivered by a technical support firm). Average is far far below that – 5 mins response time and 45 mins resolution time.

Here is our VPS management offer details

• 24/7 Live Chat for you, the server owner (at no extra charge)
• 24/7 transparent support for end user – We login to your helpdesk and do the tickets
• 24/7 Proactive VPS node Monitoring
• 15 minutes guaranteed response time – Often a ticket is responded or resolved in 5 minutes time.
• 6 hours guaranteed resolution time – Often an issue is resolved in less than one hour time.
• Installation of 3rd Party Software/Scripts in the VPSes, as per your client requests
• Level 1, 2 and 3 Support
• We can provide Pre-Sales & Sales support too at this rate
• We monitor each VPSes inside the node as well (upto 20 VPSes and for 20+ VPSes monitoring is charged $3 per VPS)
• Level I,II & Sales Chat support for end user
• Firewall Installation and hardening of VPSes
• Reactive, regular updates for the VPSes
• Free setup of billing scripts and such for your VPS clients

Trust us! we really care for your clients. We take pride in the reviews they give for you here, while we remain anonymous to them.

With this plan, you just need to arrange for the backup space of the VPSes and start offering managed VPS very easily.

Pricing

One VPS node – $249 per month
2 – 5 VPS nodes – $229 per month
5 – 10 VPS nodes – $199 per month
10 – 20 VPS nodes – $179 per month
20+ VPS nodes – $149 per month

For order links, please contact our sales or chat us via IM.

Here is a brief of our other offers

24×7 Shared support – $999 per month (Live chat included + Unlimited tickets)
24×7 Dedicated support – $2999 per month (Live chat included + Unlimited tickets)

Till this offer lasts, we also offer dedicated Level III admin for just $1299 per month, while a semi-dedicated level III admin can be hired for just $799 per month.

With our dedicated staff,

• You can chat in person as if he is your hired employee
• 5-10 mins response times
• 10 mins – 3 hours resolution of issues
• Server monitoring
• Live chat
• Forum postings

And any customized requirements you would want (y)our staff to do.

For placing an order, please chat with us online from any of the instant messenger or Live Chat service provided to you from our website at http://www.supportsages.com or email sales [a][t] supportsages.com .

Please note :

• SS supports all virtualization technologies and multi-platforms also.
• This offer is valid for July 15th 2010 only

How to solve this

Pre-Requisites : You should have Shell access (as root) to the Node server.

Mostly this happens due to inode issue. The inodes allocated to the server maybe full. inode is a data structure on a traditional Unix-style file system such as UFS. An inode stores basic information about a regular file, directory, or other file system object.

Steps

Say we are logged into the Node Server. There we are going to list all the Containers existing on the Hardware Node. By default, only running Containers are shown.

[root@linuxvps1 ~]# vzlist -a
CTID    NPROC STATUS   IP_ADDR        HOSTNAME
100     18  running    100.20.11.111  WEB.EXAMPLE.COM
101     63  running    100.20.12.203  -
102     169 running    100.20.92.182  server2.example.com
103     81  running    100.20.56.169  example.net
78965   236 running    100.20.77.204  server1.example.com

Assume your container is 103. So simply enter into 103 by this command

[root@linuxvps1 ~]# vzctl enter 103

Check if the inodes are full in the container

[root@linuxvps1 ~]# df -i

Most Probably it should display something like this :

Filesystem      Inodes      IUsed        IFree     IUse%      Mounted on
/dev/vzfs       200000      200000       0         100%       /
none            65536       95           65441     1%         /dev

Bang ! The inodes on /dev/vzfs mounted on / are full. You’ve to go nowhere else to see why that error was delivered. A simple solution will work out, you’ve to increase the inode limit. You’ve two options, either through Shell or through the Node Control Panel (like Parallels Infrastructure Manager)

First we will go through Shell mode with this command :

$ vzctl set veid --diskinodes softlimit:hardlimit 

Where ‘veid’ is the VPS ID

root@linuxvps1 ~]# vzctl set 103 --diskinodes 7680100:7680200

Second we are going for Node Control Panel. In the infrastructure, you will see your VPS with a ! sign. That indicates your VPS is having some sort of issue.

So you’ve seen the Alert. Next access the VPS, go to Resources tab. I’m sorry to tell you that I grabbed this screenshot after resolving the issue, but it will help you anyway

You should see the ‘Disk Inodes’ is full under ‘Disk Usage’ category (Here it is not !). Next Click Configure to settle this one

See the Highlighted part, the inodes should be limited to some size. Increase it or remove the check mark to make it unlimited.  Make sure you save the changes. Now try again accessing cpanel/WHM/Webmail. It should load with out any issues.That makes a smile in your face, isn’t it ?

PHP is similar to many other scripting languages like perl, python etc. But unlike perl and python what makes it stand apart is, its adaptability and power to be used as both command line and server side scripting.  I hear Yahoo’s mail runs on PHP.

I shall try to explain you the difference by executing the same file on different modes. Don’t expect too much from this post.

Command Line (CLI)

PHP Command Line Interface or PHP CLI  as the name implies,  is a way of using PHP in the system command line, like below.

# php -i | more
phpinfo()
PHP Version => 5.2.10-2ubuntu6.3

System => Linux den 2.6.31-15-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 10 14:54:29 UTC 200
9 i686
Build Date => Nov 26 2009 14:40:20
Server API => Command Line Interface
Virtual Directory Support => disabled
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc/php5/cli
Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

In other words when the SAPI ( Server API) is “Command Line Interface” as you see above php-cli acts as a connector between underlying  php binary and the command / script which invokes php from shell . This enables processing of the scripts which require php functions and provide the result after execution of the script.   The advantage is that it doesn’t require a browser or webserver  for the execution. It simply requires a PHP parser ie PHP_CLI. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks. (Okay even image processing tasks )

PHP CLI is available on all popular operating systems.  The first step we need to ensure is that the CLI SAPI is installed. For this locate php binary path and execute the command as given below

[george@server3]$ type php
php is /usr/local/bin/php
[george@server3]$ /usr/local/bin/php -v | grep cli
PHP 5.2.9 (cli) (built: Jul 10 2009 19:22:08)

The result ensures that the php-cli module is installed. Now let us  see, how to make it work in a shell. The first thing is to identify the exact path on which php  binary is present. I assume that its /usr/local/bin/php.

Now create the test file info.php

vi info.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Execute the  file from the shell using the command line or shell. If you intent to use it in a cron specify the binary path (interpreter) as the first entry of file .

/usr/local/bin/php info.php

Then the out put will be  of the following  format

[geroge@server3]# php info.php | head
phpinfo()
PHP Version => 5.2.9

System => Linux server3.xxxxxx.xxx 2.6.18-128.7.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon  Aug 24 08:21:56 EDT 2009 x86_64
Build Date => Jul 10 2009 19:17:35
Configure Command =>  './configure'  '--enable-bcmath'  '--enable-calendar' '--enable-dbase' '--enable-ftp'  '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--enable-libxml' '--enable-magic-quotes'  '--enable-mbstring' '--enable-pdo=shared' '--enable-soap'  '--enable-sockets' '--enable-zend-multibyte' '--enable-zip'  '--prefix=/usr/local' '--with-curl=/opt/curlssl/'  '--with-tidy=/opt/tidy/' '--with-ttf' '--with-xmlrpc'  '--with-xpm-dir=/usr' '--with-zlib' '--with-zlib-dir=/usr'  '--with-litespeed'
Server API => Command Line Interface
Virtual Directory Support => disabled
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /usr/local/lib
Loaded Configuration File => /usr/local/lib/php.ini

You can see the Application Programming Interface (API) for this script by  checking the variable Server API. In the above test, it is shown as Command Line Interface. The value gets changed according to the mode of usage or execution.

As I mentioned above the php binary was  invoked  by the php-cli interpreter. Once php binary executed the query , the result was returned to the SAPI  ie php-cli, it then passed the results to the command line.

Why do we use it?

Its a quite handy option to create cron jobs. Some times we may need to perform some sort of updates or script execution periodically. If we set  a cron job for this using php, the php-cli option is quite useful.

Server-side scripting

PHP is extensively used for creating dynamic Web pages. You create pages with PHP and HTML. When a visitor opens the page, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor’s browser along with the static HTML pages. PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document.

So the minimum requirement for here are the following ones

1.  Web browser ( client side)

2.  Web server

3.   The PHP parser :  which connects the webserver with the underlying php installation.

Illustration :

Now lets us, take the same example. Here I am trying to access the page through a web browser. Let us see how the result looks like

Here , you can see the difference. In the first case when I executed the same file from shell  I got the output without any format. Now the same result is shown as an HTML page.  So let us see  how the conversion takes pace.

The webserver is  connected to the php with the help of “Server API” . This is called PHP parser  it is either CGI or Server Module like apache, litespeed etc. You can see  it is “CGI” here, but it can vary according the mod of installation and webserver it uses. Common values are FastCGI/CGI , Litespeed API, Apache etc

Once the HTTP  / Web server gets the request for the page with php , it calls PHP interpreter to generate HTML. Then this HTML is returned to the client – internet browser which sent the HTTP request.

I believe you might got some ideas how it works or differs . I shall try to give  the difference between CGI and a server module on another post

Server API (SAPI)

PHP is meant  to work on all platforms. So it is essential that it should work with different types of webservers as well.   Every version of  php comes with a set of Binaries to connect php with various webservers and it is known as SAPI.  During configuration of php, we  need to give corresponding options for the webserver to which the interpreter is to be enabled. Once the php is compiled and installed , the corresponding SAPI  will be activated. So every communication between the webserver and PHP will be interpreted  using the corresponding SAPI module enabled.

Apache may use “Apache Handler” while LiteSpeed webserver use “LiteSpeed API” as the SAPI.

Extensions

Being a powerful language which can perform various levels of operation,  PHP needs to utilize various functions and libraries installed on the server. For example GD libraries are required for a php script which performs image manipulations. While a shopping cart or such applications require db connectivity to be enabled.  Like in the case of SAPI a lot of such connectors are shipped along with PHP.  To extend the functionality of php, we enable the necessary libraries while configuring the application using “–with”  option.

You can create your own php extensions and php modules and compile them also.  Again, we will have a discussion about it later.

So for the client who want to have the fancy directory indexing to be enabled, just add the below lines to his .htaccess

Options +Indexes
IndexOptions FancyIndexing VersionSort

I hope this snippet will help someone!