mig5 specialises in Linux server and network administration, and can:

• Provision Linux servers for you from whatever provider you prefer. mig5 recommends and uses Linode and the Rackspace Cloud.
• Provide and perform regular security upgrades as they are released, to keep your system up to date and secure.
• Install and configure applications or services on your server
• Make optimisations to your server if required
• Troubleshoot problems and respond to incidents/outages and get things working for you again.
• Set up Nagios monitoring and Munin graphs to cover very low-level diagnostics of your system.

mig5 is not a hosting provider. Virtual server hosting in the 21st century is already an affordable commodity that you ought to enjoy without me marking up the price from other providers.

Nagios and Munin

Whether you run your own server or we provision and manage it for you, mig5 can help you monitor your system and the services running on it using using the industry standard sysadmin monitoring tool Nagios. This tool constantly performs checks to retrieve low-level statistics about your system.

Depending on whether the result of the check is OK or CRITICAL, Nagios can even send you alerts that there's a problem. Alerts can come in the form of Push notifications to your iPhone, SMS, and / or e-mail, and often several of these at once.

Prefer a graphical representation of your system? mig5 recommends using the popular tool Munin to poll your server and generate graphs of your system regularly, which can be useful to identify slowly growing issues, or even troubleshoot a situation that occurred 5 minutes ago but has recovered.

Secure Offsite backups

mig5 can build tools for you that use the excellent program Duplicity to take backups of your server, encrypt them to prevent unauthorised reading, and store them in the Amazon S3 cloud.

Because the backups are encrypted, they are safe in the cloud. Duplicity runs full and incremental backups, allowing you to restore your server back to any point in time!

Duplicity is the perfect backup system for the Cloud, because the costs are low, there is no need to purchase additional hardware, and your backups are stored offsite from the server you're backing up in the first place.

Your backup crons will send you a report every time they are run, stating whether the backup was a success and what changed.

Offsite backup tests

In conjunction with our Offsite Backup service, mig5 offers state-of-the-art tools that will automatically create new servers in the Cloud on demand, restore your backups to them and send you a report. You'll have SSH access to the new server for 48 hours to sift through your backups or restore if needed. This entire process is automated thanks to Cloud-based technology!

Firewalls and security hardening

You should always have a firewall running on your server to prevent unauthorised access or exploitation by malicious parties. mig5 can write custom iptables firewall rules tailored to your needs. You'll get a copy of the script plus documentation outlining what it does, in our excellent Support system.

In some cases it may not be possible for you to lock down SSH access to specific source IP addresses. mig5 can still help you by

• locking down SSH to use public SSH key authentication only (no clear text passwords),
• run '3-strike' IP blocking systems such as DenyHosts or Fail2Ban,
• configuring SSH to run on non-standard ports,
• preventing root user logins, and
• allowing SSH access to only specific system users.

Other InfoSec services are on offer such as penetration testing and auditing.

Pricing

Quotes in estimates of hours required to complete the work.

Quantity	Rate per hour
4 hours or less	$140 AUD
Over 4 hours	$110 AUD
Monthly retainer (min. 4 hours a month)	$80 AUD

Get in touch!

The Ægir project is a hosting system build in Drupal to manage many Drupal sites.

You can think of it as a control panel for deploying and managing sites, including upgrading, backing up and restoring, cloning and deleting.

Chances are you're already using it, and that's why you're here!

As one of the core developers of the Ægir project, mig5 offers consulting services to any and all users of the Ægir system wherever you may need. Specialising in:

• Installing Ægir - mig5 can provision Linux servers for you from recommended VPS providers or install on your existing server
• Upgrading Ægir - mig5 understands and even wrote some of the mechanics of Ægir, so he know how to safely upgrade!
• Troubleshooting Ægir - sometimes things go wrong. mig5 can investigate and diagnose or fix the issue for you
• Selling Ægir - we can demonstrate and explain the benefits of Ægir to help convince your clients it's a good idea
• Training and best practices - workshops to be announced soon, or contact us for private sessions for you and your agency

All Ægir consultancy work is charged based on an estimate of hours required to complete the work.

Quantity	Rate per hour
4 hours or less	$140 AUD
Over 4 hours	$110 AUD
Monthly retainer (min. 4 hours a month)	$80 AUD

Get in contact today!