Recently Zone Alarm has been disabling all web traffic via browsers regardless of the program permissions assigned.  Programs such as itunes, virus scanners etc all connect fine except for browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.

Zone Alarm is discovered as the culprit because when it’s disabled, the internet works.  When it’s re-enabled, the internet stops working.  There are two methods of resolve.

First - update Zone Alarm; this fixes the problem that I was informed has emerged due to a Windows update that alters some settings Zone Alarm relies upon.  Secondly, if an update is not possible, downgrade the Firewall tab “Internet Zone Security” from High to Medium.  This also resolves the problem.

As the cost of my fuel has increased, and is fast approaching £1.20 / litre, i’ve been looking at ways to reduce the cost of driving.  After all, Euromillions failed to answer my prayer, and instead of seeking vengeance upon that cursed machine, i’m seeking recuperation elsewhere.

Top Gear recently run a show saying it’s not what you drive, but how you drive it, and a few weeks of driving differently have shown a massive increase in fuel consumption.  Infact, my car is achieving 450miles per tank, rather than it’s usual 350.  That’s an extra 100 miles.

Now, my driving style annoys other road users that are obsessed with speed ( tail-gating and getting from a-b 2 minutes faster than everyone else, but risking their lives in the process ) but it makes sense in the long-run.

• Drive slower on motorways. This has been the major contribution in increasing my petrol consumption.  By slowing from 70 to 55 on motorways, i’m getting an immense improvement in fuel consumption.  As your car goes faster, your engine has to work harder, therefore by slowing down, your engine works less. And guess what, my 8 mile journey takes me 2 minutes longer.  Just 2 minutes! And don’t think you’ll be the slow hog, you’d be amazed how many people don’t bother trying to overtake even when they can, and even doing 55 you’ll meet someone going slower than yourself in time.  And here’s the great thing - don’t overtake them, just slow down!
  
  This is madness! - is he honestly telling us to slow down?  How do you slow down?  I always thought cars were for going faster and faster, now we’re being told to slow down?!?!
• Stick to 30. It’s simple.  In fourth gear, at 30mph, my car is using about 1700rpm - it’s not struggling, and it’s not sucking gallons of fuel in.  Infact, so far i’ve used 7 litres of fuel from my new tank and done well over 100 miles.  If you’re constantly racing around 30mph roads, you’ll be using an excessive amount of fuel every time you drop to third and overtake, or speed up coming out of bends.  And you’ll find that you often pull up behind the person that overtook you and raced off down the road at the next set of lights.  Allowing you to look smug.

  
  And if there’s one thing I like doing, it’s looking smug at other people’s expense.

• Accelerate Slowly you love the sound of hitting 4000rpm in 1st, 2nd and then 3rd before settling into fourth i’m sure.  It’s a manly sound, it makes me think i’ve got hair on my chest and a penis the size of russia.  But alas, it damages my wallet too much.  Upshift as soon as you can, I normally do it at roughly 2,000rpm.  Sure enough, i’m not doing 0-60 in 5 seconds, but i’m not really holding anyone up either.
• Forty In Fifth is an amazing principle.  When you do forty, do it in fifth gear.  It’s such a simple change, and research has proven that driving at forty in fith rather than forth gear saves up to 20% of fuel consumption.  Imagine that!  A fifth more fuel in your tank!  Simply for changing gear!
• Use Geography as your friend.  If you’re on a hill, roll down it. Don’t accelerate down it, let gravity pull you.  If you’re stuck at a set of lights, facing downhill, don’t pull off in first - roll a bit so that you can start accelerating from second gear - it’s much more economical.

  

And a controversial claim… choose your fuel carefully. Now a lot of people believe there is no difference between ordinary unleaded fuels, but i’m not the only one amongst my circle of friends who notices that paying a penny or two more a litre and filling up at a garage such as BP, Shell or Esso yields better mileage than supermarket fuel.  Decent fuel, with decent additives in it makes a decent engine.  You don’t have to waste money on BP Ultimate or VPower, their normal fuel normally makes a difference.

And I bet you think this is all too hard to do.  After two weeks of driving with your wallet in mind, you’ll soon find it becomes force of habit.   Drive slower on motorways, don’t accelerate as harshly, stick to the speed limit and use fifth instead of forth at speeds 30+.

As for those thinking, hey, wtf, this is a technology blog about webservers - my muse has been abducted!  OMG, call the internets police, woop woop!  I’m just chewing over my wallet more than I used to, and keeping a close eye on ze dollars.

Normal service resumed next tuesday.

So i’m becoming something of a scrooge.  My money isn’t as good as it used to be ( i’m getting more of it, but it’s not going as far ) and i’m loathe to give up my luxuries ( such as my fully-staffed laser death ray, secret volcano lair and entire collection of signed niel diamond records ).  As a result, i’m starting to look at penny-pinching for the best of everything…

It’s widely known that the best cinema experience money can buy, outside of private home auditoriums, is the Gold Class seats at Vue Cinemas.  A small private cinema, only a few dozen seats, and a private bar.  All very cosy, but all at around £8/ticket in the day ( 9-5 ).  Which is £16 for the two of us.

I never thought that those people at Orange would fork out £8 for one of my cinema tickets, but apparently their offer applies to the Gold Class aswell ( as long as you see a show starting before 5pm ).

Huzzah!  Hooray!

Is it time to panic now, and call in the internet police?  After all, i’ve just gone into cPanel and discovered that an IP has been added to my Remote MySQL Database Hosts.  192.168.1.% - who is this wildcard, are they accessing my private MySQL data?  How did they get access to my cPanel?  I’m compromised and it’s all the fault of those supermarket-brand bran flakes I ate this morning.

A handstand of woe, would be fitting at this point, I believe.

Looks quite painful that does.  But it’s what happens when you type handstand into Google.  Anyway, back to the issue at hand, this IP is nothing to fear.

192.168.1.% allows access of the whole 192.168.1.0-255 netblock to your MySQL admin, but that netblock is reserved for private networks only.  It isn’t a publicly accessible netblock, and is only available on local networks.  So, it can’t be accessed outside the local infrastructure, but why is it there?

Do you run any software that accesses MySQL from your cPanel?  Such as Fantastico?

Well, I hate to cut a post short with an easy answer, but there it is.  When you use an auto-installer or add-on application in cPanel that requires MySQL access, it very often adds this netblock to the remote access hosts so that it can function correctly.

But it’s making you uncomfortable, right?  You can delete it if you want, it shouldn’t cause any damage, and the application will simply re-enter it if it needs it again.

The stress is over.

Quite recently a lot of traffic to sites under my control is apparetly, acccording to Awstats etc, arriving via the search term “Abmany”.  A quick scan of the code reveals tha

t this word is completely devoid of my text, so the mystery deepens.  Why are people crazed on Abmany ( is it some sort of avocado, furry water-dwelling creature or byzantine mating ritual? ) ending up eating my bandwidth?

Some digging reveals that users who search using myway, myway browser toolbars etc have this phrase inserted by their search engine into their address bar.  Awstats then mistakes this word for the ttrue search keyphrase.  This results in misrepresentation of search referers in your logs.

Simple mystery, solved simply by listening to Ethel Merman and eating apple turnovers.

Many people are claiming that they cannot use Mod_GZip in EsyApache, and therefore, have no way of compressing data unless they compile it manually.  However, many are finding that even compiling mod_gzip manually yields quirky behaviour, and very often this is to do with versioning.

Put simply, mod_gzip doesn’t work with Apache 2.x - and as a result, now that EasyApache is compiling Apache 2.x left, right and centre on webservers across the globe, your luck for compression has run out.  Or has it?  I haven’t danced for a long time, and i’m feeling like some cha cha…

Damn that feels good.  Now, where was I?  Oh yes, apache based http compression via mod_gzip.  The solution to this problem is simple, Apache simply adopt a newer module for compression, and this is called mod_deflate in Apache 2.x

Therefore, in order to get mod_gzip type functionality in Apache 2, you need to use the mod_deflate module.  You should be able to compile this into Apache through easyapache on cPanel/WHM or manually, without too much effort.

You may figure that when your webserver suffers an outage, that you loose e-mail that is being sent to you.  This is not the case.  When someone tries to send an e-mail to an address that is having trouble, in all standards compliant mailers the system acknowledges that the recipient computer is unresponsive and queues the mail to be sent later.

It then tries again at intervals specified by the system administrator of the e-mail server, often every 6, 12 or 24 hours, and will continue to do so for up to 72 hours to see if it can connect.  Therefore, as long as your mail server is not down for more than 3 days continuously, when it comes up, it should receive a backlog of all mail for all addresses on it.

Please, do not panic that your mail is getting lost - it’s merely in a queue, waiting for the chance to strike.

Whether it be your business, the application that monitors life support on your pet squirrel or simply e-mail that you need to have high availability, shared hosting is not the answer.

There is no way any shared host can achieve near to 100% availability, the problem is the variables involved.  You have potentially hundreds of users on the same machine, of which any could be running vulnerable, insecure or memory-hogging scripts that can cause disruption to services.

VPS systems remove some of these variables, but still, there are scripts that can bring an entire node to it’s knees and crash the server ( resulting in a lengthy reboot process ).

Dedicated servers remove more variables, but datacentre issues, DDOS attacks on nearby servers and poor administration on your part can still render them incomprehensibly down.

If you have a mission critical site, and put it on shared hosting, your comments and complaints about how much money you loose when your sites are down will fall on deaf ears amongst administrators everywhere, and teenage oversellers will be the only ones offering you sympathy whilst trying to lead you to join their financially insecure service.

£5 a month will not bring you stability, and if your business can’t handle 5 or 10 minutes of downtime per month, you really need to be multiplying that figure by at least 100 to get a decent isolated reliable service.

If you insist on staying with shared hosting, shit happens.  Yes, scripts will knock the server offline every now and again, yes when software and operating systems update very often hardware has to reboot also leading to a further few minutes of downtime.  And yes, just sometimes, a network inbetween you and your host will have trouble causing packet loss.  These are all to be expected.

Please, please join me in leading the revolution against the uneducated that preach messages such as “my shared host has been down for 5 minutes, this is unacceptable, i’m loosing loads of money, someone recommend me to go elsewhere!” ( with lots of leet mixed in for good measure ) and more importantly against those hosts who echo “that is completely unacceptable, how dare they update apache and have to restart its services, come to my hosting company and you’ll never get downtime”.  My head hits my desk in dispair everytime I read one of their messages.

Do wits and common sense disappear as soon as you think about purchasing webspace?

Whoop, whoop! Somebody phone the internet police!

Virtuozzo Power Panel states that your http service is down. All hands on deck, panic stations, this is going to be a long, hard, cold, yet surprisingly moist war of attrition against whatever force does negative things to our httpd processes…

Yet, wait… when I look in my browser, http is up and webpages are service fine. Furthermore, when I look in my cPanel, it also says status for http is OK. Yet when I look back at VZPP, it says things are awry and the world shalt be ending soon with the killing and the hurt and the unavailability and the downtime statistics not seen on the face of this mere planet since William knocked out the power supply to Harold II’s stone based abacuses back in 1066.

But, and this blog seems merely to be filled with long historical inaccuracies and what I like to think of as my native wit, fuelled by copious amounts of tea, VZPP has got it wrong.

The system is not designed from the outset to work with cPanel, and cPanel is not designed to work with VZPP. And even though they do work together, surprisingly well on a well-administered server, VZPP does not check for http functionality where cPanel installs http ( rather it looks for plesk http activity ). Therefore, you cannot trust Vituozzo’s http alerts to be accurate if you run cPanel, because http through cPanel does not interact correctly with Virtuozzo.

Problem solved, case closed. Time for street dance.

Oh yeah. I know hip-hop.

Less detail on where i’ve been for the past few weeks…

…and more focus on the main conundrum of the century, which is, why, when following Apache’s own suggestions for adding new mime types via htaccess, do my mime types not work at all?

The following line in your htaccess should force the download of any files ending in pgr,

AddType text/pgr .pgr

Worse still, adding the extension as an octet stream ( such as AddType application/octet-stream .pgr also just results in the file being displayed as text ).

So, what can we do, except run into the street and dance in perfect formation?

Log into cPanel , go to Mime Types ( the link is in the Advanced box of the x3 skin ) and add your MIME type to the list. This should work.