I’ve been having trouble with IPv6 on my El Capitan Mac over T-Mobile’s network.
Continue reading post "#3267"WWW posts page 10
PHP-FPM / Apache caching symlinks
At Cogneato, we use symlinks to point the web server to different versions of our software for websites. Sometimes, especially on our Ubuntu server, which uses PHP-FPM to serve PHP files through Apache, I was noticing problems caused by scripts being loaded from the previous symlink destination when I changed to the new one. There seems to be some sort of caching going on. The solution was to restart PHP-FPM and Apache after switching the symlinks. On Ubuntu, this looks like:
ln -s /path/to/new-version /path/to/software-link \
&& sudo service php7.2-fpm restart \
&& sudo service apache2 graceful
where the 7.2 is the version of PHP being used. Haven’t noticed the problem since.
I accidentally opened up my main Firefox profile in Firefox Developer Edition and now it won’t let me open it in regular Firefox.
Continue reading post "#3261"Deploying updates to my site with a composer lock file seemed slower since updating to version 2, so maybe it isn’t faster in some circumstances.
I see that composer has released its 2.0 version. Nice.
Looking at Apache logs with command line tools
In my web development career, I have countless times needed to look at Apache logs to figure out or find out about problems with sites, monitor activity, or for various other purposes. I’ve used command line tools to help with this, often looking for strings and counting occurrences. Since I recently needed to create a command string to count unique IP’s connected to a given string in the logs, I thought I’d post about it and a few related useful commands.
Continue reading post "Looking at Apache logs with command line tools"Custom logic for unattended upgrades reboot
The Ubuntu / Debian unattended-upgrades package has an option to automatically reboot as needed when it upgrades packages. It will do this without user input, at a chosen time. However, it doesn’t allow for any conditions beyond need and time. I found a need for more nuance recently, so I had to disable the built-in functionality and set up my own script on a cron job.
Automatically deal with conf changes using unattended-upgrades
For Ubuntu servers, I use the unattended-upgrades package to automate keeping the system and packages up to date. I recently noticed some of Cogneato’s servers showing packages needing to be updated for multiple days. When I looked in unattended-upgrades.log (in folder /var/log/unattended-upgrades/), I found the message “WARNING Package something has conffile prompt and needs to be upgraded manually”. Basically, there was a change to a configuration file and it didn’t know how to handle it.
I figured out why the T-Mobile Home Internet router has SMS in its web interface: I had to retrieve an auth code through it to set up my web account.
Continue reading post "#3157"I’ve got home internet again
After three and a half years tethering for my home internet, I’ve given in and switched to “real” home internet: T-mobile Home Internet. Yes, it is cellular just like tethering, but it should allow for a lot more monthly transfer and may have bigger and better antennas and different handling at the tower. I finally gave in because the cost made sense and I feel it will give me more freedom and ease of doing things that require data.
Continue reading post "I’ve got home internet again"