Posts made by WingCreative

Here's a step-by-step guide for moving Apache to another port (8080, in fact) and setting up nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache on the same server.

This might give you some helpful info to use as a jumping off point...

Good luck!

I also finally killed the spider that has been lurking in my office for the past few days.

Today has been a good day.

@Ambarishrh said:

Cooking Chicken Korma and trying out a new drink. Had some leftover Vodka orange from our party (Not really a vodka fan!). Vodka orange+pomegranate juice+little bit of fresh orange juice+orange zest. Tastes good, helps me to finish that!

I always enjoy mixing orange soda with vanilla vodka to make something that tastes a lot like a creamsicle... I wonder if it would be similar using vanilla cream soda and orange vodka?

Every now and then I remember trying new stuff out on tiny live sites I worked on back in the day and it makes me cringe.

Right now it's because I went from 502 errors (HHVM didn't restart after an instance reboot) to the server not responding to pings (oh yeah ICMP is blocked) to a constant connection reset error (WordPress' Site URL setting kept redirecting to the old IP address).

Still, I've managed to get a WordPress server going on AWS with an elastic IP, which is way more than I could say for myself three days ago!

...And now I just terminated that server because my custom AMI replacement worked after switching the elastic IP over. So hypothetically the outage I dealt with on Monday would be almost totally avoidable on this platform with what I've learned so far.

I definitely feel like my WordPress game just leveled up, and it's only about $2/month more than what I was paying at Vultr for slower servers and less control.

Just a few more steps to go until I can start testing migrations and measuring how the new host affects performance!

And here I am in Oregon waiting for the temperature to drop down below 90 later this week with no chance of rain in sight.

What is going on

In one of those "learn a bunch of new stuff and develop new routines" cycles... This guy is back to being my mascot for now:

For one reason or another, something monumentally stupid happened to one of my clients' Vultr instances yesterday that took it down for far too long. When we went into the clients' Vultr console to check on its status, the VPS was stopped with a message that it was down due to some emergency thing and technicians were working on it to bring it back up ASAP. Okay, cool, but I saw that at 4pm and it stayed down until almost 10pm when I submitted a support ticket through the client's account asking for an update on the outage.

Right after submitting the report, the VPS hosting their webserver went from "stopped" to "running". It started responding to pings but wasn't serving the website yet, so I tried viewing the console and got in at first but then got a connection error that kicked me out and kept coming back when I tried to reconnect. Attempting to restart the server through the console was met with an error message stating the server timed out so it couldn't be restarted. I was about to try an SSH session when the website loaded in my browser and seemed to be working fine again. I was able to log in, make a full backup, and download it. Shortly afterwards the support ticket was updated with a message noting that the instance should be back up and running now. The entire time, all of my own VPS instances on my account were running just fine.

I'm glad the server came back up, of course, but I can't shake the suspicion that human error was ultimately responsible for the length of this particular server's outage. Though possibly a coincidence, it is pretty fishy that the server came back up immediately after submitting a ticket after being down for so long. It makes me wonder if the actual outage wasn't that long but someone forgot to flip a switch somewhere to start the server back up... And of course, their SLA is vaguely mentioned in the TOS but not actually laid out anywhere I have found so far... except that you waive your right to it if you don't mention it to them within three days.

Throughout the outage, spinning up a backup from their automated server backup system didn't work, despite me doing exactly the same thing earlier that day on a test server. The original VPS was in LA, and the backup instance was in Seattle, but neither of them were loading the website. Also, the LA node was listed as green with no issues here the entire time.

I'm just glad I'm on good enough terms with the client, and the website is small enough at this point, that it wasn't the gargantuan issue it could have been. Still, you better believe I now have the motivation to learn EC2 hosting and revamp my site backup system. Vultr just went from "awesome" to "not for production, or maybe anything" within the space of a few ridiculous hours.

@Dashrender said:

@WingCreative said:

Apparently I'm running an Exchange 2007 to Exchange Online staged migration for 1 user...

We upgraded almost a year ago, before I even started working here, but a temp employee just came back and needs access to her email and oh yeah it's on-prem still. Time to learn stuff I shouldn't need to know!

This is how people get a case of the Mondays.

What? that's crazy. Assuming you can connect OUtlook to that server, I'd just create a PST then import that PST into her online profile.

Interesting, I might go try that! Thanks for the idea, I'm not very well versed in Exchange-o-mancy.

Apparently I'm running an Exchange 2007 to Exchange Online staged migration for 1 user...

We upgraded almost a year ago, before I even started working here, but a temp employee just came back and needs access to her email and oh yeah it's on-prem still. Time to learn stuff I shouldn't need to know!

This is how people get a case of the Mondays.

@scottalanmiller said:

@WingCreative said:

Oops I just realized I posted in the wrong thread, haha. Good thing "anything goes" B)

What thread were you hoping for?

The "What are you doing right now" one right next to this one

Oops I just realized I posted in the wrong thread, haha. Good thing "anything goes" B)

Using some of my free time today to jump into the deep end of WordPress development by writing my first plugin, using it as a chance to try out version control through BitBucket as well. I have a feeling version control and I are going to be best buds now that I've gotten around to actually setting it up!

Kind of how I feel about Gulp, but that's for another day...

If management allows it, I would suggest helping him adjust his status settings so it doesn't broadcast whether or not he's been away from the computer for 5 minutes. Bumping it up to inactive at 30 minutes, away for an hour would probably help ease him into it... but you could also make the limits super high so he has to manually set his status to something besides a generic "online".

At the end of the day, some accommodation might be made but his workplace is shifting to a new form of communication. He will need to deal with it as a workplace annoyance, or find another job. As others mentioned, you could muck around with settings to try and make it impossible to close but there isn't too much point if you're putting a policy in place soon. After that it becomes a policy violation and management's problem if he continues to close out of it.

Definitely disappointed in ASUS for this, they have been one of my favorite brands for consumer hardware for a while.

This positive bias makes me want to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they could have had mostly good intentions on this - since it's on ROG hardware only, I can see the software being intended to prioritize gaming-related network traffic or something benignly dumb like that.

Hopefully they will inform us of its purpose in their apology post explaining how they've disabled it by default or something like that... A man can dream, right?

But yeah, they will be last on my list of hardware vendors when I actually get around to upgrading my PC now.

So... Y2k15?

Fair enough, it does make sense to spend a little more on a wireless headset if it's going to be much more reliable, and I'm just buying one so it won't be a huge investment to "splurge" for quality. I I guess I mainly just want to cover my bases and make sure I didn't miss some hidden gem somewhere since it seems like the existence of bluetooth headsets is making people skeptical of the prices I'm throwing out.

I don't blame them, really - I had no idea wireless headsets for desk phones would be this expensive still until I started researching them.

Thanks for the feedback!

I feel like I'm overthinking this but I just want to make sure.

I've been asked to find a nice wireless headset for an analog NEC telephone. It has a square RJ in the back labeled "headset". I've never been the one buying headsets for stuff like this before so I want to make sure I do it right without overspending.

I found this Plantronics headset which seems like it would probably work... it's pretty expensive though and I hear Plantronics is kind of a more premium brand for stuff like this.

Are there cheaper wireless headsets out there that are designed to hook right into an analog headset jack, or am I chasing a unicorn here?

PS as I wrote this out, the person who asked me to price this decided to do their own research and sent me a link to some dirt cheap bluetooth headsets. Apparently they forgot that I told them bluetooth wouldn't work with our landlines last week.

@Dashrender said:

Do you need something that beefcake for PFSense?

I'm guessing I could run it from a VM, though I'd want some dedicated NIC ports for it.

My pfSense test instance is running off of a VM just fine, but it has been tricky to get the XenServer Tools to work with it as there's no official support for BSD as far as I know.

I'm making Captain Planet proud by packing things up for an e-cycling trip! Good times in ~100 degree weather...