Woo! There have been a lot of changes here at Nobreaks.ca I’ve just completed moving hosts to Digital Ocean in favour of their OS image selection and backup/restore/snapshot options as well as a slight decrease in cost a slight decrease in hardware specs followed naturally however the new OS we are running (Fedora 21) manages software and resource interactions so efficiently a downgrade was very much in the cards without risk of harming performance or availability. IPv6 is now used on the servers as well as some of the most up to date software I have ever used. So far it’s been a great experience. The snapshot capabilities are stellar and the regular backups done by them are a nice safety net. One outstanding feature I was taken totally by surprise was the fact that I can VNC into the session as it boots meaning I could utilize grub during an update of the OS for example. Topping out at nearly 90,000 files between the two servers I manage it takes the NAS running in RAID 6 even with the gigabit connection about an hour to rsync and backup to disk from empty folders to full synchronization. But, you can… Read More »Busy Busy Busy

As the number of user increased at a more steady rate than I ever expected I’ve been pushed to keep up network capability and reliability. These are some behind the scenes shots of what runs the Nobreaks.ca Plex Servers. All images clickable for large scale Brace yourself, rack mountable gear not mounted ahead… 24 Port Easy Smart Switch TP-Link, Smart RG DSL modem/router cooled by one of my many fans around the world   8 Port TP Link Easy Smart Switch behind 55 inch LED Smart Samsung TV, TV provided via IPTV, Phone via VOIP and PS3 (Roomates), XBOX One and XBOX 360 when I get the time.   Bad picture of the 6 bay RAID 6 dual gigabit NIC link aggregated NAS holding a backup of all Plex Data   Rear of NAS Above     Rear of PC spouting 6 Gigabit NICS all aggregated for 6 gigabit bandwidth Admin Fule above Night Shift Worker above LightSpeedTaco Out!

Thanks for sticking around this long! It’s only been a few months but we’ve had a great influx of Plex users and with this come new challenges that I’m still trying to tackle and hope you can all bear with me while I get things sorted out. It’s been a great past year and I’m looking forward to continuing to provide more features, content and ease of accessibility to you all. LightSpeedTaco

The initial setup of the new switch went very well however there wa some packet loss involved that I wasn’t sure what the root cause was. After a lengthy session of troubleshooting, pinging and wiresharking I narrowed it down to a busted/overheated modem or a bad cable/nic. Turns out, nic number 3 was busto. I’ve removed that nic and I’m currently performing ping testing for reliability and packet loss (if any, se far so good though). Everything should be working just fine and I’ll append this post once I have results in the morning that everything is stable. Thanks for your patience. LightSpeedTaco

Just a heads up in-case you missed it in the earlier post. I’ll be doing some network maintenance on the server’s network tomorrow. Specifically setting up a new switch so expect inconsistent uptime for the Plex server. I’ll keep you posted via this post when maintenance begins and when it ends as well as the outcome. Sorry for any inconvenience. LightSpeedTaco