My posts on Linux

My Netflix rant and workarounds for the recent blocking of IPv6 tunnels

Recently Netflix decided to block IPv6 tunnels, as part of the on-going geo-unblocking agenda. No doubt this is due to pressure from the various media corporations/license holders that have been behind the blocking of proxy and VPN services as of late. This time however, its a little bit of a different situation. IPv6 tunnels are primarily not designed to be services to circumvent geo-blocking and many users of such services have totally innocent intentions when using an IPv6 tunnel, mainly because their ISP doesn’t provide IPv6 connectivity natively yet. I am one of those users in the UK, who has a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel and was surprised to learn Netflix is straight blocking them now. Find out how I worked around the problem without giving up my IPv6, while also ranting at Netflix about the whole thing.

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Dovecot and IMAP issues on Windows 10 Mobile

Lately Outlook Mail on my Lumia 950 XL which runs Windows 10 Mobile has been throwing lots of notifications regarding my personal IMAP mailbox account having out of date settings. This has been occurring sporadically and becoming quite a pain. Sometimes up to 7 or 8 notifications are generated in the Action Centre within short periods of time. Interestingly my mail account settings are correct and the mailbox is syncing email with no problems. After doing some investigation on the server side I believe I’ve found the cause of the issue and its related to the maximum number of IP connections available to the Dovecot daemon. Read more to find out how I fixed it.

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Revealing why emails appear off-centre in Android 4.4 (KitKat)

Recently some members of the Litmus Community noticed that email campaigns in Android 4.4 were no longer being centred to the device width. I was slightly puzzled by this as overall Android 4.4 has a pretty decent email experience, but sure enough I started seeing email content being cut off on the right hand side. Looking at my code I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary that would cause this. Wanting to find out more, I dived into the source code of the Android 4.4 mail app to get some answers! Find out what I discovered.

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Running DirectAdmin through a reverse proxy with Apache 2.2/2.4

DirectAdmin runs on port 2222 by default, for restrictive firewalls this port will likely be blocked hence you’ll be unable to login to the control panel. You could of course use a VPN or SSH tunnel, but unless your running those types of services on standard ports like 443, the most restrictive firewalls aren’t going to allow such actions. Instead what you can do is use a reverse proxy and run DirectAdmin on port 80/443 with a bit of a custom Apache configuration.

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Configuring different DNS servers per interface with DNSMasq

DD-WRT Web Interface on the ASUS RT N66U

In my home I happen to run a small Windows Server 2012 R2 domain, I have two Active Directory servers, one is the primary and the other replicates the primary AD server in the event of it ever going down. Because of this AD setup, I am running the DNS role on these servers but leave DHCP duties to my ASUS RT N66U router, running DD-WRT. I configured my RT N66U to push Static DNS addresses of the AD servers to clients, however I also have Virtual Wireless interfaces which are not part of the same subnet and unbridged. Pushing these DNS servers at clients connecting via these interfaces will essentially sink hole their DNS lookup ability, so I needed a way to configure DNS servers addresses based on the interface, fortunately with DNSmasq you can!

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