Tag Archives: sysadmin

Looking for the best way to keep data on servers safe

We know we should all be doing it, but most of us don't do it enough. I put out a request today to my followers Twitter asking this question: I've had the following services recommended to me by a number of fellow developers whose opinions I have a lot of respect for: A couple of [...]
Posted in Coding, sysadmin | Also tagged , | 1 Comment

Tar is not zip

Today, I had to package up some code that was residing on a remote server that I had ssh access to, to send to someone who was probably on a windows box. This meant I had to use the zip tool, which I can never remember how to use, hence this memory jogging post. Now [...]
Posted in Coding, Journal | Also tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How to fix a WordPress site when the database corrupts on you.

Phew! ... and as soon as I say this, the database powering this site corrupts on me - charming! For one awful moment I thought I had lost everything (I hadn't set up a regular mysql backup task for this blog), but thankfully, bringing this blog back from the dead was surprisingly straight forward. Here's [...]
Posted in Coding, Journal, meta, sysadmin | Also tagged , , , | Leave a comment

After reading this, I think I’ll let someone else work on Solaris boxes in future

I was doing some research on StackOverflow today to find out more about using Chef-Solo to manage smaller numbers of virtual machines (i.e. less than 5 for example), and I came across this snippet on a confessional thread about the worst mistakes you've made as a sysadmin: I had fun discovering the difference between the [...]
Posted in Coding | Also tagged , , | 1 Comment

Setting up wordpress to update itself

WordPress’s auto update feature is incredibly handy. However, not every webhost automatically has accounts setup to allow for this, and if click the promising looking auto-upgrade icon, you’ll often be face with this screen here: You get this screen when the folder containing wordpress belongs to the user, instead of the apache daemon; this is [...]
Posted in Coding | Also tagged | 2 Comments

A brief primer on using ssh

I keep forgetting how to do this, so I'm writing this here for future reference. This year, as I use web app frameworks like Django or Rails more and more, I've increasingly been using the command line instead of tools like Transmit for making changes to sites and web apps. This works fine locally, but [...]
Posted in Journal | Also tagged , | 2 Comments