Articles by Scott Hebert

1. Redis: Better Session Storage for Magento

   Posted on October 28, 2015 in System Administration

   Out of the box, Magento has four methods available for storing session data: filesystem, database, memcached, and tmpfs. The default method is to store session information in the filesystem. I believe that storing sessions in Redis is actually superior to all of the aforementioned methods. Each of the four default …

2. Pelican: Insert Article Summaries into WordPress

   Posted on October 26, 2015 in Programming

   This is was my next project.

   Update: For now I've solved this problem by using FeedWordPress to pull the Atom feed for the Pelican-specific portion of the website.

   • Use this as a starting point for the XML-RPC bit.
   • It should first try to pull the article before committing a new …

3. Using Pelican's article.summary

   Posted on October 23, 2015 in Programming

   I'm using Jinja2 templates with my new Pelican-based articles. If you have Django experience, you'll feel right at home using Jinja2 templates. I decided early on that I wanted to create my own theme from scratch and keep it as basic as possible. (In fact, 'basic' is the name …

4. Getting Started With Pelican

   Posted on October 20, 2015 in Software

   I've been using WordPress on this site since 2007. After all this time, I've decided I want to try something new. So, I've decided to go in a completely different direction and start serving static content. There are three things driving my decision to change:

   • The existing site is really …

5. El Capitan Leads to More DNS Woes

   Posted on October 06, 2015 in System Administration

   Captures an El Capitan DNS-search-domain workaround while flagging the need for a current macOS DNS diagnosis and supportable fix.

6. Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license...

   Posted on September 21, 2015 in Programming

   Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

   Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
   

   This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

7. nginx: Blocking Access to /xmlrpc.php

   Posted on July 31, 2015 in System Administration

   I recently ran into an issue on a Wordpress site running behind an nginx web server. The site was frequently being attacked by a botnet hitting /xmlrpc.php so rapidly, it would eventually force the FastCGI processes behind nginx to consume all available CPU. Naturally, this would cause all legitimate …

8. Goodbye, discoveryd. Hello again, mDNSResponder.

   Posted on July 07, 2015 in System Administration

   Great!

   Once again, Apple has made a change in how DNS is handled in Mac OS X. Originally, Yosemite (10.10) had replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd. This meant that all of those who had made a change to force mDNSResponder to always append search domains to DNS lookups had to …

9. UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019'

   Posted on May 22, 2015 in Programming

   Once again I was working on some Python code for EVE Online. This particular bit of code gathers a list of kills for a particular region and then summarizes that data in a daily report. Everything had been working properly, until one day...

   Traceback (most recent call last):
     File "/Users …

10. Career Advice: Becoming a System Administrator

    Posted on May 01, 2015 in IT Management

    Recently, I got an email that went something like this:

    I have completed a BTech in Electronics and Communication. Now, I am working as a desktop engineer. How can I move my career to the network / server side?

    Career moves are hard for everyone. Personally, I've been thinking about making …

11. Why Isn't tmpreaper Working?

    Posted on April 20, 2015 in System Administration

    If you have a directory that you want to keep clean, tmpreaper is a great way to remove files based on how old they are. The other day, I had a directory that looked like this:

    x@x:~/dump$ ls -l
    -rw-r--r-- 1 x x 212268169 Mar 15 01:02 …

12. [Python] urllib2 with gzip or deflate encoding

    Posted on April 16, 2015 in Programming

    The other night I was working on some Python code that interacts with the zKillboard API. The API call returns kill information via JSON for EVE Online. While making the request, I was getting an error that I was using "non-acceptable encoding." It turns out that the zKillboard guys require …

13. WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!

    Posted on December 18, 2014 in System Administration

    We run several (read: hundreds) of servers that are still running Debian 6 (Squeeze). A few months ago, we started seeing the following errors coming from the daily apt cronjob: "WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!" When running apt-get update the following errors dump out:

    $ apt-get update
    W: GPG …

14. OS X Not Appending Search Domains - Yosemite Edition

    Posted on November 20, 2014 in System Administration

    It seems this problem has resurfaced again with the new version of Mac OS X. More specifically, this problem seems to affect appending search domains when the hostname contains a dot. In Yosemite (10.10), mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd. Fortunately, all we need to do here is add …

15. Mac OS X Not Using Search Domains

    Posted on May 04, 2014 in System Administration

    Every time I restart my OS X Mountain Lion (10.9) laptop, it stops using the DNS search domains I've added via the Network preferences pane. I have found that restarting mDNSResponder fixes this issue. There are two ways to do this.

    The first is a simple restart by sending …