Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

Instagram Importer works again!

After some digging around and troubleshooting, I managed to fix the DsgnWrks Instagram Importer WordPress plugin on my site.  It turns out quite a few people had an issue with it, which started back in September/October of last year (2017).  The solution, they say, is just to remove the authenticated Instagram user from the plugin settings, and add it again.  I’m not quite sure if that’s the only thing that helped, as I’ve adjusted quite a few other things all around (HAProxy timeouts, Nginx timeouts, PHP maximum execution time, etc).  But it seems like the right thing to start with.

Keep in mind that you should backup the current user’s settings for the plugin (screenshot or save the page as HTML or just copy-paste them somewhere), because they will be reset to the defaults when the user is re-added.

I have just now imported about 40 Instagram pictures that weren’t synchronized since the last September.  Enjoy!

The Complete Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization

SitePoint runs an extensive guide to the WordPress performance optimization.  Not only it goes over the usual points like hosting selection and avoiding unnecessary plugins, but it also provides some insight into the WordPress database management and optimization, web server tweaks, and links to a few handy tools to help with performance of your site.

Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

“Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL” is an interesting study with plenty of technical detail of how MySQL was a better choice than PostgreSQL for the very demanding growth of Uber.  These kinds of issues are probably way out of scope for any “regular Joe” application, but the insight into the differences of MySQL and PostgreSQL architectures is still useful.

Main PostgreSQL limitations covered by the study are:

  • Inefficient architecture for writes
  • Inefficient data replication
  • Issues with table corruption
  • Poor replica MVCC support
  • Difficulty upgrading to newer releases

forget-db – a simple GDPR inspired tool to anonymise confidential database data

forget-db:

A simple(ish) command line tool written in PHP 7.1 using Laravel Zero and Faker to help you anonymise/pseudonymise data within your database to support protecting either sensitive information, or peoples right to be forgotten with GDPR compliance.

The tool allows you to connect to either mysql, postgres, sqlite or sqlserver and replace defined information with random data to allow you to keep statistics/relationships/audit of actions etc.

It uses a simple yaml configuration file to define the conditions for overwriting, which fields you want to overwrite, and what to overwrite them with.