server posts

Server upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04

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My server was on Ubuntu 20.04, but due to the end-of-life of that LTS version next month, I have upgraded to 22.04. My server is managed with Vagrant / Ansible. My plan had been to do a new local VM on the newer version, get it working properly with Ansible, then set up a new server with it and migrate over. However, since Ubuntu isn’t releasing an official Vagrant box for 24.04 and beyond, I don’t think it makes sense to take that path. I may move over to Debian or look into Vagrant alternatives, but to get this done before EOL, I decided to just try a do-release-upgrade to upgrade the existing server in place.

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Goodbye Dreamhost, hello Digital Ocean

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My server, and with it my blog, a client site, and other web properties, was down for four days. I put in a support ticket and didn’t get a response until the fourth day. I’ve been with Dreamhost since 2009, and using DreamCompute since 2017, but I don’t think the product gets nearly the focus that their shared / managed stuff does. I use Digital Ocean at work, and it has been a much more polished and solid product for unmanaged VPS. That is where my site is now hosted.

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Annoying bot and Cloudflare free rate limiting

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Some German bot(s) seemed to take interest in one of Cogneato’s sites, Rockin Houston. The aging site is fairly inefficient with a lot of data, and the bot was causing high load on our DB server. I have implemented a PHP blocker for certain IPs, but I wanted something more broadly applicable. I made a rate limiting rule on Cloudflare that should block this type of behavior and prevent it from even hitting our server once the rule triggers.

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JS: ES Modules and Node bare specifiers via response rewrite

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I’ve been playing with JS lately, including ES modules and building with Rollup, Babel, and Terser, along with other accessories. One thing I’m disappointed with of ES modules in the Nodejs ecosystem is dealing with third party imports. Using the “bare” specifiers that Node expects works fine in that environment and thus tools running in it (possibly needing helpers), but they don’t work at all directly in the browser. This is discussed in this post by Jake Archibold, for instance.

Import maps are one solution in the works, but that requires explicitly mapping every dependency, which could get complicated fast when dependencies have dependencies. It also is only in draft stage and only works in Blink based browsers currently.

I eventually gave in to the idea of having server code rewrite the paths in the js file responses to point to a symlinked node_modules folder, similar to what is mentioned in this post by the Polymer project. I created a PHP test server for one of my projects that does this.

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Looking at Apache logs with command line tools

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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.

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