Today, The Storehouse experienced an outage that lasted approximately 12 hours. This was caused due to updates performed late the night before and services restarting during that process.
Author: Andrew
Eliminating Cron Jobs In An Application
When you have an application, there’s inevitably some things that just need to be done periodically. These aren’t tied directly to user actions, so the quick answer is usually cron. It’s easy to setup, but when it breaks it can cause subtle issues that may impact your customers or application.
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter OpenVPN Client Config
One thing that’s really handy for your Ubiquiti EdgeRouter is to have it act as a VPN client. This gives all hosts on your network the ability to access the remote VPN without having to login. Setting it up with pfSense is straightforward and pretty easy with the right tools.
Staggering `chef-client` Runs
One of the new tools I’ve discovered is Chef to manage the configuration and software on Storehouse’s fleet of virtual machines. Chef makes it really handy to update and track config changes, since everything can be tracked using Git or similar. One issue we ran into was having `chef-client` run at the same time for multiple machines.
Make a Site Private, But Allow Let’s Encrypt
This is a pretty straightforward thing I’ve wanted to do for some time. Basically, I have a number of sites that I use internally that I wanted to get certificates via Let’s Encrypt, but I also wanted to keep them restricted to only a few IP addresses. The solution is quite simple and works perfectly.