You may have noticed extended periods of downtime for the site however Plex was working just fine. It’s actually been the most stable its ever been. I’ve received some positive feedback regarding performance as well so I moved my focus to the site itself and keeping you as informed as possible. Today marks the availability of a brand new server status page where you can check out what’s going on inside the server running nobreaks.ca. Check out the menu under “Server Status” or head to the page from here. The page is of course fully protected by our SSL certificate.   Next on the agenda. Site security. It’s too easy to hack websites that are ill informed and don’t have recent implementations of popular software such as recently SSL and, of course, Apache. Feel free to inspect the versions the most prominent pieces of software on the site at the bottom of the status page which is in real time by the way. I’ve also added a seal on the left under the SSL verification seal for vulnerability scanning which occurs on a weekly basis and emails me the results. After several days of work, scanning and fixing security holes… Read More »Server Status Page and Enhanced Security

After a lot of messing around and research I’ve decided to make some critical changes to the server and upgrade from CentOS 6.6 to 7.0. This enables me to install the latest Apache and use MySQL 5.6 which is leaps and bounds better than the prior iterations particularly in the Innodb handling department. I’ve also been able to update the OpenSSL version we are using and this was actually one of the deciding factors to migrate to CentOS 7 since an upgrade in place on CentOS 6.6 was near impossible. I had decided I’d spent enough time on it. So here we are, and I can say from the time I spend on the various portions of the site, it is blazing fast now. I’ve been doing some tuning, i.e MySQL, Apache and PHP optimization. As a result I’ve achieved a maximum load time (while stress testing) of 4 seconds with an average of 1.30ms and a minimum of even less in some cases. Once I had the machine purring I began to invest my time in the security of the server itself. Applying firewall rules that only let me access certain portions of the server (specific ports) and managing… Read More »Performance Tuning and Security Hardening

After switching hosts, one change that occurred was, I was no longer using a Plesk Control Panel which is what 1and1 VPSs utilized and a Virtuozzo container manager for the actual virtualized session restart and such. As a result, I had to install applications one by one and configure them – which was a newer task to me even, as comfortable as I am in CentOS. The biggest issue was the installation of the SSL certificate. As it is a single domain certificate and not a wild card certificate I had to be very specific in my virtual host creation and even more so in my .htaccess work. To ensure all traffic is encrypted through the SSL certificate, I have to redirect all traffic to the port 443 which SSL operates on but not via a mod_rewrite.c block in the web root .htaccess like one might with a wildcard certificate. Apache and mod_ssl both have Virtual Host entries in their configs which dictate where to look for files to serve and what file to serve in specific to their type or name. I achieved the redirection via the httpd.conf file redirecting permanently all port 80 (typical unencrypted HTTP traffic) is… Read More »Website Stability Returned to Normal

After seven years of loyalty to 1and1.com I’ve gone ahead and transferred the site and all its contents and put them into my newly purchased VPS over in New York at RamNode who have been fantastic to me since the second I was interested in their services. For a lesser cost than what I was previously paying per month I gain increased control and security over the entire virtualized container. Gone are the days of internal errors when load spikes. The speed of this host is also pushed to its limits as it is running on a SSD and what appears to be an incredibly fast network connection. While I will still be using 1and1 for DNS nameservers and MX server purposes, the cost will be much lower and again the control much higher which is what I expected from 1and1 initially. They’re not a bad host, they simply have so many people and systems to monitor that they limited some values to make life simpler for them in particular when multiple customers are utilizing the same hardware. Secondly a proxy script I’m very familiar with has made its way to Nobreaks. Visit https://dev.lightspeedta.co/glype or find it in the side bar… Read More »New More Robust Host and a Glype Proxy for You!

So as you may have seen, constant downloads are now a thing. This can occur as a result of some clever work I’ve been doing to maintain uptime of my system provided the UPS attached to the devices has juice and it’s quite a UPS so it’d be a good while of no power before it is truly dead. Anyway, through the use of software I have automated the reboot and login of my server and maintenance of certain mission critical software, i.e Plex Media Server. Great, now the programs will always run, but what if Windows decides its time to reboot for whatever reason. Autologon has been configured and will log back into the system and run the specific software to restart the process of being able to monitor and acquire media and subsequently make it available to you. What about in the event my router/modem hangs or there are connectivity problems? I’ve written a batch script that communicates with a third party program which telnets into my router/modem and tells it to reboot in the event that the Google DNS server at IP 8.8.8.8 cannot be reached for more than 30 seconds consecutively. Now the longest unscheduled outage… Read More »Bullet Proofing Uptime