My posts on Servers

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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CrashPlan and Filebot, beware of extended metadata/attributes!

Recently I decided to rename some of my media collection with Filebot, which is great tool for batch renaming media content. I also use CrashPlan on my main file server that backs up my data to the CrashPlan cloud (CrashPlan Central). An interesting issue occurred recently where CrashPlan started getting stuck in a weird cycle and keep disconnecting from the backup destination regularly after the renaming of some files was performed. I was slightly puzzled by this as a rename of files shouldn’t cause any issues, thanks to CrashPlan’s data deduplication processes, CrashPlan will only send the changed data blocks to the cloud rather than the whole file. After some troubleshooting I found the root cause and its all to do with metadata!

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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which runs Windows 10 Mobile has been throwing lots of notifications regarding my personal IMAP mailbox account having out of date settings.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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Storage Spaces and the lack of built-in data balancing functionality

I blogged about changing my home media setup late last year on my HP Microserver N54L after migrating from Windows Home Server 2011 to Server 2012 R2 Essentials and choosing to use the Storage Spaces feature with a parity configuration. One key area that became apparent more recently is the lack of data balancing in any given pool configuration. This is potential trouble spot for a few reasons. I’ll go through the pains and workarounds of getting data balanced on a Storage Space pool.

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Per directory PHP monitoring with New Relic, Apache and DirectAdmin (mod_php)

New Relic is a great service for monitoring servers and website applications. One of the major features is New Relic’s PHP application monitoring and the ability to do per directory PHP monitoring. This is useful for web servers that run PHP but serve multiple PHP applications under different domain names/directories. Being able to create per directory PHP application monitoring allows you to get more meaningful data about a specific PHP app and gives you the ability to segment your app data easily. I’ll show you how you can automate this type of setup with an Apache setup which is controlled by DirectAdmin.

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