eworldproblems

Career, Part 1

It has been over five years since I have added to this blog. The reason at the highest level is a predictable one – it fell from the top of my list of priorities in favor of…

Reset connection rate limit in pfSense

Note to self next time I get bit by it:

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 for download from OIT’s webpage is out of…

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At work, we’re way out of date in our devops, having not upgraded Puppet since version 3.8.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.

The easiest way to (re)start MySQL replication

linux

I’ve run mirrored MySQL instances with asynchronous replication from time to time for almost 15 years. The fundamentals haven’t changed much over that time, but one thing…

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…

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:

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…

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:

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…

Pinterest hover buttons and picturefill

Pinterest hover buttons, those little “Pin It” buttons that appear when mousing over images on Pinterest-integrated sites, don’t work if your site is using HTML5 responsive…

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…

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…

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…

Extreme Home Network Makeover: IPv6 & hostapd

linux

When constant.com made IPv6 available on its dedicated servers and shortly thereafter Comcast finally got around to lighting up IPv6 on my home connection, I inevitably had…

CyberPower UPS OR700 with nut: secret sauce

After my last UPS (a dumb APC thing picked up from officemax) bit the dust, I got myself the CyberPower OR700. I was a wee bit leery of the CyberPower linux code…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

PHP’s mysqli::reap_async_query blocks

php

Just a quick note about mysqli::reap_async_query since the official documentation is surprisingly lacking, and I’ve never had any luck getting user-contributed comments…

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…

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…

SignalR Hub Authorization

signalr

I set about making use of the new hub authorization feature in SignalR 1.0 today. It was a bit difficult to obtain answers about what it actually does and how it works, so I…

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…

“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, interm…

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…

rdiff-backup is just right

linux

So I recently took the plunge and began renting a dedicated server. There’s a number of things I am using it for or plan to use it for, but one of them is as an off-site…

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…