artofsimplicity

Over the past few days I’ve been slowing migrating my small collection of posts I’ve accumulated over the past 8 years (or so) to Hexo from WordPress. I thought I would commemorate the occasion with a new post.

If you’ve recently performed an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade only to find that your server is no longer accessible, then the culprit could be a package called biosdevname included in a possible grub or kernal update (TBC).

Note: This applies to ngrok v1.x - unfortunately ngrok 2.x hasn’t yet made their source code available.

We’ve been testing a third-party API that uses webhooks to notify your system when particular events take place that you might be interested in.

As you might appreciate, testing webhooks in a local development environment is tricky because these external APIs or sandbox developer environments have no way of pinging (sending a request to) your URI because its running on localhost which is not accessible to the outside world.

And a good thing too.

If you’re using PHP 5 and MSSQL extension to retrieve data from Microsoft SQL Server and you’re seeing your columns truncated at around the 30 character mark, it could be down to your FreeTDS settings.

For context, I’m using Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) and when I run the following command, I can see the following output:

I’ve been bitten by this apparently little known quirk in PHP5 when installing the database extension for Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL).

You may encounter it if you use the MSSQL datetime type.

The nature of this quirk relates to the configuration under certain unknown circumstances.

If you’ve been struggling to get vsftpd (2.3.5) on Ubuntu (12.04 - Precise) this is due to a security feature that prevents the chroot from being writeable.

This is a major problem if you have virtual users and your using PAM and MySQL to administrate FTP user accounts.

You might have spotted the message:

1

500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()

In the past, I’ve been using Dropbox to securely store backups for sites. However, since I was introduced to BitTorrent Sync (BT Sync), I immediately liked the concept of running by own Dropbox-like setup without the costs and limits that Dropbox imposes.

The documentation is still a little sparse and somewhat confusing, so I’ve put together these few instructions to help get you up and running.

As BT Sync is still in alpha stage of development, it’s seeing lots of updates and is in active development so versions and options and features are likely to change rapidly.

I’ve been using 1&1 Linux Dynamic Cloud Server for some time now and realised that one particular site had utilised almost all of it’s available space in /var. I had already extended the space by 10 GB using the fairly helpful

This is connected to my previous Dropbox post.

Important aspects are extracting a MySQL dump of a database (Credit: Vivek Gite) in addition to a specific folder of a website. Then placing both backup files into a Dropbox folder for safe keeping.

While I use Git to deploy my websites and therefore don’t require backing up of the entire site. Some folders with user-generated content or media may need to be specifically backed up and therefore this script could be used as the basis for that sort of functionality.

I’ve been thinking about improving the way I backup my sites and thought I would look into employing Dropbox to help.

While this is by no means a new idea, I thought I would document the process for posterity in the event I need to get this setup again.

First thing you’ll want to do is create a Dropbox account which is very easy and takes only a few seconds.