• MySQL 8.4 Upgrade - A Cautionary Tale

    calendar May 5, 2024 · 5 min read  ·
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    MySQL 8.4 Upgrade - A Cautionary Tale

    This is a cautionary tale about ignoring deprecation errors in infrastructure. On April 30th MySQL 8.4.0 came out and I managed to get caught with my digital pants down on the 2nd of May when I upgraded a group of servers running MySQL under docker that were the back end for a number of websites. To add to the pain I …


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  • Xfiles a Factor in Icinga2 Graphite Graphs

    calendar Dec 1, 2018 · 8 min read  ·
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    Xfiles a Factor in Icinga2 Graphite Graphs

    It seems I celebrated a little too soon after figuring out how to add extra archives into the whisper DB files behind graphite for icinga2. This blog post is a bit of a ramble and may not make 100% sense if you didn’t read my other icinga2 graphite post first. Check that out here. The flaw in my plan wasn’t apparent …


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  • Icinga2 Graph Data Retention

    calendar Nov 25, 2018 · 10 min read  ·
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    Out with Nagios, in with icinga2 Note: I’ve updated this post since I originally posted it. See my post about xFilesFactor here which describes why I updated it. I’ve been on a bit of a journey over the last few months migrating from nagios to icinga2 for my systems, some customer stuff and the platforms at my day job …


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  • When the Cloud goes bad

    calendar Apr 16, 2014 · 4 min read  ·
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    When the Cloud goes bad

    Before you read too much further this is a bit of a self-serving rant, bought on indirectly by the heartbleed bug published a couple of weeks ago. I’m a fan of cloud hosted virtual Linux servers for hosting and messing about of the geeky kind. The ability to spin up a box and play with it to your hearts content then …


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  • The evil Super Admin Password

    calendar Mar 19, 2011 · 2 min read  ·
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    So you’ve survived a disaster, fire or other adverse event, and you need to shift staff home to work because the office is a pile of smoking rubble. Their PC’s from work are by a stroke of luck usable, and they’ve got broadband. Two thumbs up there. But about that printer driver you need… It requires admin rights. The …


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  • Taking joy from simple news: IE6 and Youtube

    calendar Feb 25, 2010 · 2 min read  ·
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    Anyone who has anything even remotely to do with web development will be smiling at the news that Youtube is going to discontinue support for IE6. Not only that, we’ve got a date. 13th of March, 2010. While this isn’t really the end, it will certainly put that little bit more pressure on the roughly 15-20% of internet …


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  • Security in the cloud, KISS

    calendar Nov 14, 2009 · 2 min read  ·
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    The idea of keeping things simple when it comes to server security is not at all radical and cloud servers provide the ability to reach the not so lofty goal of keeping your servers simple and secure without breaking the bank. The theory is simple: The smaller the number of processes you have running on your box the …


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  • Working on a cloud

    calendar Nov 9, 2009 · 2 min read  ·
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    This blog is now coming to you from a cloud. A rackspace cloud server that is. Two of them in fact, the front end server running the CMS, and the back-end MySQL server. The concept of cloud computing really isn’t all that new, but if you’re all at sea when it comes to clouds you might want to toodle over to Wikipedia …


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