Last year Google proposed marking any and all sites not using SSL in a negative fashion in its Chrome browser. This year they are indicating they plan on moving forward with this:
Google Chrome gets ready to mark all HTTP sites as ‘bad’
To clarify what this means for small content creators… an extra ~$100+ a year for hosting a website, not to mention SSL adds a layer of complexity to the hosting. (more…)
Explain how to undo or rollback an apt-get install command on a Debian or Ubuntu or Mint Linux.
Source: Rollback an apt-get upgrade if something goes wrong on Debian / Ubuntu Linux
All I have to say is, AWESOME! I am filing this one away as potentially a life saver if I ever fail to “Think twice.” before proceeding to “Hit enter once.” The brief guide above shows how to grab all the information you need to quickly “undo” the installation of packages installed during a specific time frame on an ubuntu/debian based server.
I have been doing some work on a drupal site recently and working heavily with Taxonomy.
I had a need to identify Taxonomy terms based on the person that created them.
The problem with taxonomy terms is that unlike traditional content types, author information isn’t automatically appended when a term is created. Terms are just terms. However in Drupal 7 and beyond they are also “fieldable” entities. I will get to why that is so important in a bit…
There is a module I came across called “Private Taxonomy” which seemed to fit my needs perfectly. Until I found out it was a bit buggy and administratively heavy. (more…)
I wrote a new script today to keep me up-to-date on how full the boot partition is on my Ubuntu servers. I actually administer quite a few of them and it can become a real issue if the boot drive hits 100% full, which it commonly does. The reason for this is that the boot partition by default is quite small (usually under 200 MB) and will fill up, often over the course of only a few months, with kernel files.
I have seen some servers carry on just fine when this occurs, I have also seen other servers exhibit some really odd behavior. Either way, it is best avoided.
The problem (and the blessing) is that Ubuntu Server is Linux… which means it requires very little administrative intervention month to month because (unlike another well-known and much used server platform) Linux tends to just work and work and work and work.
Very early on I went in for a job interview in IT. At the time I was a freshly minted MCITP, and knew very little about anything outside of Microsoft. The gentleman interviewing me asked me what my experience with Linux was, to which I replied “very little.” He then thought for a moment and said, “Well that really doesn’t matter, we have several Linux servers and the primary issue we run into is that we forget about them for 3 – 5 years until a power supply or spinning disk dies.”
That sums up most Linux setups in a nutshell. All that to say, it legitimately might be several months in-between administrative server logins. A fact which most admins are quite thrilled about.
When I started realizing that Ubuntu Server was going to require regular intervention, albeit fairly lightweight stuff, I was a bit bummed. It probably isn’t a horrible thing, rock solid stability aside it is still a good idea to login now and again to keep your software packages up to date. However that tendency to “set it and forget it” remains.
Long story short, I needed an automated alert system.
Solution, a shell script running as a cron job that will shoot me an email.
If you are following along, we are now going to dive in to the practical instruction bit. (more…)
I think I have put together a pretty good solution for load balancing websites across multiple instances of IIS 8.5. I am sure my ideas aren’t novel but I am documenting them here for future reference. This isn’t meant to be a full walkthrough but rather it is me keeping notes for personal use and may be a useful springboard for admins with similar needs.
A Quick Introduction to DFSR
DFSR (Distributed File System Replication) is a Role/Feature built into Windows Server – it can be used to keep folders in-sync across multiple servers. Caveats such as replication latency mean that it might not be ideal for all use cases. DFSR is based more or less on the same technology that replicates active directory information between domain controllers. DFSR does “block level replication” which means changes made to files on one end don’t require the entire file to be re-replicated but rather just the changes. This is extremely useful if you are dealing with large “non-static” files. DFSR, I think, was introduce circa Server 2003 so it has been around for quite a while, it just wasn’t something that had really been on my radar until very recently.
(more…)