Spamd is one the highest resource consumer on a cPanel server. It allocates a lot of memory from the get-go and holds on to it throughout. There is a way to limit the number of spamd processes that are spawned. On a cPanel server, which is what this guide covers, there is a configuration file called /etc/cpspamd.conf with the following lines:

maxspare=1
maxchildren=3

For a leaner server. we recommend dropping maxchildren to 1 and maxspare to 1. This will save a good hundred of megs of memory. Don’t forget to restart exim for these changes to take effect.

I hope this tip is useful. That’s all folks!

We are well ahead of target to achieve a 99.99% uptime using our geographical failover solution. We have put our failover solution live online for the whole world to see. Do pay a visit to the website when you get a chance! It is located here:

http://www.cpanelfailover.net

Cheers!

If you receive one of the following errors, it’s very possible the Apache process is listening on port 443 but is not responding using the SSL protocol routines. In brief it is a protocol mismatch. Here’s a list of possible errors:

Firefox error: SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length

Apache error log: \x80d\x01\x03\x01

Curl CLI error: curl: (35) error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol

The fastest way to recover from such error is to restore the most recent Apache configuration file from backup. If you do not have a backup copy, you will need to look at your virtualhost section associated with the domain and SSL port combination. Chances are it does not exist. In cPanel, this issue can be corrected with a simple run of the script rebuildhttpdconf as such:

/scripts/rebuildhttpdconf

After making the necessary changes, and whether you are running cPanel or not, you will need to stop Apache then restart it.

That’s all folks!

As some of you know, UNIXy has engineered a cross data center failover solution for Virtual Private Servers. The solution consists of two mirrored VPS nodes running in two distant and independent data center facilities with separate power grids, network, and management personnel. The benefit of such setup is that a website can be reachable at anytime, rain or shine, regardless of outages. The idea is that the chance of two independent data center facilities being down at the same time is almost zero. No single facility can ever achieve such uptime!

The amount of interest this solution has generated is amazing! Today, we have decided to show the world that this solution simply works. We are announcing the cPanel VPS auto failover challenge! This is our way of eating our own dog food. Over the next few days, we will be communicating the full details of the challenge including the domain name and content that shall live and shine forver.

The event will be announced on http://www.cpanelfailover.com

Stay tuned!

Outlook fails to login or retrieve emails after a server move. This is due to the SSL certificate on the new server confusing Outlook. This is especially important when the mail server name used in Outlook doesn’t change during the move. The solution is to reset or regenerate the email services certificates on the new server then restart outlook. Or you could also delete the certificate pertaining to the host name used in outlook (ex: mail.vpslux.com). If you are using cPanel on the server, you can reset the SSL certificate via WHM -> Manage Service SSL Certificates.

That’s all folks!

Pure-ftpd has no direct support to prevent files with certain extensions from being uploaded. But it’s possible to accomplish this goal using a pure-ftp feature. pure-ftpd has a post-upload program that runs after each file is successfully uploaded and can run an external program. Here’s the excerpt from the pure-ftpd manual:

NAME
pure-uploadscript – Automatically run an external program after a successful upload

SYNTAX
pure-uploadscript [-p ] [-B] [-g ] [-h] -r [-u ]

So the program to run in our case can be a simple Bash script I’m going to call ban.sh

#!/bin/bash

uploaded_file=${1};
banned_extensions="zip tar rar";

for ext in ${banned_extensions};
do
count=$(echo ${uploaded_file}|grep -i ${ext}$|wc -l);
if [ "${count}" -gt "0" ];
then
rm -f ${uploaded_file}; # File with banned extension detected. Delete it.
break;
fi;
done


So you start the program in the background like this:

pure-uploadscript -p /var/run/pure-ftpd.pid -B -r /root/ban.sh

That’s all folks.