eworldproblems

Sporadic chronicles from a decade and a half of dev

Career, Part 1

It has been over five years since I have…
Dec 27, 2023

 

Reset connection rate limit in pfSense

Note to self next time I get bit by it:
Jun 25, 2018

Screenshot of creating a new Cisco compatible connection

Connecting to University of Minnesota VPN with Ubuntu / NetworkManager native client

I had a devilish time this morning connecting to UofM VPN on my Ubuntu 16.04 system. The official Cisco AnyConnect client available…
Jan 1, 2018

 

Running nodes against multiple puppetmasters as an upgrade strategy

dev
devops
linux
At work, we’re way out of date in our devops, having not upgraded Puppet since version 3.8. As of this writing, version 5 is available.
Aug 22, 2017

 

The easiest way to (re)start MySQL replication

linux
I’ve run mirrored MySQL instances with asynchronous replication from time to time…
Jan 2, 2017

 

Keeping up on one’s OpenSSL cipher configurations without being a fulltime sysadmin

devops
linux
As you probably already know if you’re the type to be reading my blog, https is able to stay secure over time because it is not reliant on a single encryption scheme. A…
Dec 20, 2016

 

Introducing Prophusion: Test complex applications in any version of PHP

devops
php
Putting together testing infrastructure for Curator has been an interesting project onto itself. On my wishlist was:
Nov 6, 2016

Automatic security updates and a support lifecycle: the missing links to Backdrop affordability

dev
drupal
php
I saw Nate Haug and Jen Lampton give their Backdrop CMS intro talk last weekend at the Twin Cities Drupal Camp. They have already done much to identify and remedy some big functionality and UX issues that cause organizations to leave Drupal for WordPress or other platforms, but you…
Jul 2, 2016

 

HAProxy “backup” and “option redispatch”

devops
I’m testing out my new infrastructure-in-progress for redundant web hosting, described in my last post. The quick outline of the components again, is a total of four VMs:
Feb 19, 2016

 

Top gotchas: Creating virtual machines under KVM with virt-install

linux
After a stint building Stacy’s new blog whilst contributing to Drupal 8, I’ve been directing my free development time to more ops-like concerns for the past month or so. I moved to a cheaper…
Jan 20, 2016

 

Pinterest hover buttons and picturefill

Pinterest…
Jan 12, 2016

 

Reset a crashed migration in Drupal 8

drupal
I’ve been writing migration code for my wife’s WordPress blog to Drupal 8, using the migrate framework. This framework attempts to track if a particular migration is…
Sep 6, 2015

 

Handling GET-method submissions with Drupal 7’s Forms API

drupal
Remarkably, Drupal 7’s FAPI treats form submissions using the GET method as something of an afterthought. “Just register a URL with wildcards for that!” is the usual refrain…
Mar 17, 2015

 

More super ubuntu tips: udev-based NIC naming & lvm silicon_medley_raid_member

linux
I had a pretty booked weekend, but decided to see if I could slam an Intel Atom SoC-based board into my home server anyway. Plan of attack: take a snapshot of OS lvm volume in case things went south, mount…
Feb 10, 2015

 

Extreme Home Network Makeover: IPv6 & hostapd

linux
When constant.com made IPv6 available on its…
Nov 16, 2014

 

CyberPower UPS OR700 with nut: secret sauce

After my last UPS (a dumb APC thing picked up from officemax) bit the dust, I…
Aug 16, 2014

 

Remote drush with only FTP and database access

drupal
linux
I manage a Drupal site as part of my job, which has taught me to appreciate the treat that is drush. With Drupal,  you really want ssh access to the webserver because it gives you the…
Jul 19, 2014

 

ZFS it is

big-storage-home
Quite a few months back, in a post about the lack of ZFS block pointer rewrite, I mentioned that I’d begun investigations on whether I should migrate my home file server to a more modern filesystem. At that time, I already knew a few things about ZFS…
Apr 29, 2014

 

Drupal views join on multiple columns

drupal
Drupal views UI is nice from time to time, once you’ve spent lots of time poking at it and know it’s quirks. The rest of the time, what you need can’t be done via the UI…
Apr 24, 2014

 

Drupal webforms submissions by form_key

drupal
With the ease of entry for  basic use and API for extensibility, the Drupal webforms module is an indispensable tool. One snag with it, though, is that wherever it exposes…
Feb 11, 2014

 

Crazy scheme of the week: melding heterogeneous filesystems

At work, we have an interesting problem. The primary storage system at MSI is from Panasas, a vendor that specializes in high aggregate I/O performance from a single…
Jan 27, 2014

 

Newegg good service shoutout

product-reviews
Just a quick well-deserved post plugging newegg for taking care of me so well. I ordered some open-box hdd’s, clearly labeled as having a refund-only, no replacement policy.…
Jan 17, 2014

 

ZFS block pointer rewrite status, 2013

big-storage-home
Through one part idle internet window shopping and one part good luck, I came across a  supply (now sold out) of the disks I use in my main RAID at home, nearly 50% off the…
Jan 13, 2014

 

JavaScript’s Object.keys performance with inheritance chains

javascript
Backstory: (You can cut to the chase) I’m working on a JavaScript library in which I want to identify any changes a method has made to properties of the object it is applied to, preferably in a more…
Oct 23, 2013

txnr414

Onkyo TX-NR414

product-reviews
I’ve owned the Onkyo TX-NR414 AV receiver for a year now, and thought I’d branch out the subject matter of this blog a bit with a product review of it. My comments come more…
Aug 20, 2013

 

Sendmail’s unwanted insistence on local delivery

linux
Here’s another quick post to record one of those 2-line solutions to a problem that took considerable searching to find. This one affects outgoing mail passing through…
Aug 13, 2013

 

Nifty openssl troubleshooting trick

Learned a neat trick today for performing diagnostics on failing ssl connections when working with programs making use of the openssl libs that are notorious for providing crappy ssl error information. You can use the openssl executable to setup a simple test…
Aug 10, 2013

 

PHP’s mysqli::reap_async_query blocks

php
Just a quick note about mysqli::reap_async_query since the…
Jun 30, 2013

 

Making Ubuntu resolve names like Windows

linux
There are a few oddities in Ubuntu’s name resolution code. They mean well, but in my experience don’t always play well with Windows systems, corporate VPNs, etc. Here’s a…
Jan 27, 2013

 

Securing SignalR to your site’s users

signalr
As you know if you read my last post on hub authorization, when a new hub connection is created, the transport connection stays open whether or not the hub connection(s) are authorized. In my case, I am using SignalR in a…
Dec 22, 2012

 

SignalR Hub Authorization

signalr
I set…
Dec 21, 2012

 

http.sys equivalent for linux - worthy of some thought?

Ever since I learned of Microsoft’s kernel-mode HTTP listener, http.sys, I’ve for the first time personally felt that Microsoft has done something in the HTTP server arena…
Nov 24, 2012

 

“I want Porsche Turbo.” malware

This post is just to contribute a little to the collective knowledge about a scary Apache hijack that’s currently spreading. The hijack, which you can read about here, intermittently injects an iframe into html responses on all sites the server is hosting, with the apparent objective of running browser exploits to compromise the visitor’s…
Sep 10, 2012

 

What to do when Ubuntu won’t boot

linux
So my fully updated windows machine recently got had for the 2nd time in my personal experience through innocent browsing of websites in Internet Explorer. (Ironically, the…
Sep 4, 2012

 

rdiff-backup is just right

linux
So I recently took the…
Aug 6, 2012

 

JSON and data: URLs can show CSS Sprites a thing or two

html
I’m not usually as much into web performance as some, but I had a project in mind recently that included a requirement to load a large number of small photos onto a single page. On this project, I wanted to nail the technical…
Jul 15, 2012
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