Open Source Support and Consultancy
We provide the following services:
We offer website and email hosting using a 100% Open Source platform.
Visit the Red Cube Hosting website to find our more about our Open Source hosting packages.
We can also help you setup your own secure, reliable servers to host your website, email or application - contact us for more information.
We have been working with Free and Open Source Software since 1998 and have worked with wide variety of customers, ranging in size from single employees through to large multinationals. An increasing amount of our work is with SME’s who are making use of Open Source software to reduce their IT costs. Our customers are in both the private and public sectors.
Our preferred Linux distributions are Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but we have considerable experience with a wide range of Linux distributions. We are also experienced with BSD, in particular OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
We build mail servers based around either Exim, Postfix or Sendmail MTA’s and generally use Courier IMAP/POP3 server. We also utilise a number of open source anti-spam packages including SpamAssassin and amavis.
A lot of our work is building and supporting the infrastructure for web facing applications and websites. Generally this involves Apache HTTPd as the web server, with either a TomCat application server or PHP application. Generally these make use of a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. The most common configuration we work with now is known as the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We’ve also made use of squid as a web content accelerator, and a caching proxy server.
We have setup and provided support for numerous Open Source web applications such as MediaWiki, Drupal, Blojsum and Wordpress (which we use to run this site).
We use Samba to allow customers to run Windows compatible file/print server without needing to run Windows.
We also work with a number of monitoring packages, and make extensive use of packages such as monit and smokeping as well as our own custom monitoring scripts to monitor our customers systems and networks.
These are just examples of our work, so if you have another Open Source system you’d like us to support then please contact us.
We make use of a number of open source monitoring packages and our own custom monitoring scripts to monitor servers we manage. Most common problems, such as a service failing, can be fixed automatically by these scripts - otherwise an alert can be sent by email or SMS.
Monitoring information such as available disk space, memory and CPU usage can also be used to aid in capacity planning.
We can also monitor your internet facing systems remotely using our geographically disbursed network of monitoring servers. Common uses are to monitor the availability of clients network connections, email servers, websites and web-facing applications and notify the relevant technicians. We are also able to carry out more in-depth checks - such as notifying you of your website’s homepage changes unexpectedly.
