My posts on Servers

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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HP Microserver N54L using Storage Spaces with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials

After recently migrating away from Windows Home Server 2011 to Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials on my HP Microserver N54L I also took the opportunity to reconfigure my disk storage setup for better optimisation of storage capacity and backup/redundancy. I’ll be going through my previous and new setup detailing the key changes I made and why. My objective was to “future proof” my setup for a good few years to come under Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, making improvements along with the way and leaving expansion options open for the future. I focused on utilising a new feature in Windows Server 2012 Essentials called Storage Spaces.

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Check your OpenSSL version, you could be in for Heartbleed!

You may have read about the Heartbleed bug this morning (8th April), not only is this the day support for the operating system Windows XP ends from Microsoft but now we have a very critical OpenSSL bug to mitigate, and its quite a big one. Anyone running a Linux server is most likely affected in some way and action is required immediately. I’ve personally just had to update OpenSSL on four VPS servers and revoke and re-issue about 6 SSL certificates, serious stuff. Find out more after the break.

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How to fix the 413 Request Entity Too Large error for SVN

I use SVN (Subversion) for a lot of my projects and like many projects some can become quite large in filesize. One issue I discovered recently is I kept getting a strange error when trying to commit a change that involved a large .tar.gz file. In my commit log I kept getting “413 Request Entity Too Large” which prevented me from committing the latest changes. After looking around I found a fix for the issue, but it seems there are many ways to solve this error.

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