Shami's Blog

Why? You might ask yourself. Isn’t it just better to upgrade the web application and save yourself the trouble of all the security issues? True, but sometimes it’s just not possible or feasible. The other day I helped a friend of mine migreate from a VPS he got in 2008 to a brand new FreeBSD 11 droplet on DigitalOcean . His customer has still not updated their site, and they were paying the same rate they’ve been paying since 2008. So it was better and cheaper to move them to a new VPS even though we kept the same code. At least the OS and all other components in the stack were updated.

Read More - Running Older PHP Versions on FreeBSD 11

So lately I’ve been using Ansible to manage and bootstrap my servers. I prefer the configuration management part in Salt but orchestration has been much cleaner with Ansible for me. I might take another look at Salt later on but for the time being I run everything on Ansible.

Read More - Faster TLS Deployment With Acmetool

Lately I’ve been tinkering with Open edX at work for a project we’re working on. The customer needed a specific workflow which required emails and all the parameters I found didn’t help. But finally I found the solution here

Read More - Getting Smtp Working With edX Devstack

Quick one here, if you run into the following error when trying to download a go package using Babun

go get -u -v github.com/cosiner/argv
github.com/cosiner/argv (download)
# cd .; git clone https://github.com/cosiner/argv C:\Users\Mohammad Al-Shami\go\src\github.com\cosiner\argv
Cloning into 'C:\Users\Mohammad Al-Shami\go\src\github.com\cosiner\argv'...
fatal: Invalid path '/cygdrive/c/Users/Mohammad Al-Shami/Desktop/go/C:\Users\Mohammad Al-Shami\go\src\github.com\cosiner\argv': No such file or directory
package github.com/cosiner/argv: exit status 128

Read More - Go Get Error With Babun Shell

So I’ve been tasked with installing the Open edX devstack for work to do some testing. The current documentation is very lacking and it’s been an ordeal. I decided to summerize the process as a reference.

Read More - Installing Edx on Ubuntu Xenial

So I got a call from one of our developers telling me one of our Moodle development sites was not working. This particular Moodle instance was configured to use an Oracle backend since that’s what the customer has. Upon checking I got a “Bad Gateway” error.

Read More - Bad Gateway With Nginx, PHP, and Oracle

I’ve been using Hugo for a while now and love it. I don’t update my blog much and with Hugo I don’t need to spend more time updating the CMS than actually blogging. The markdown files are hosted at BitBucket along with my other code and I use CloudFlare for protection as well as a CDN.

Read More - Automating Hugo Deployments With Webhooks, Bitbucket, and CloudFlare

I was thinking of a way to make my laptop a bit more secure and started looking into alternative firewalls for Windows. I came across TinyWall which is an alternative front end to the Windows firewall so it’s not as intrusive as the other options. Everything was working well till I tried to pull a git repository from Babun and I got an the following error

Read More - Babun SSH/Git With TinyWall

I wanted to do some GPU processing using a virtual machine running inside unRAID . First I tried Windows and it worked, but I read that running the code inside Ubuntu 16.04 would be more efficient.

Read More - Nvidia Drivers On Headless Ubuntu Server 16.04

So while I was writing my previous post I realized that Google Analytics was being called from the localhost server. I also had lots of grief with Disqus back when I migrated to Hexo; It filled my account with posts related to localhost. I wonder why Disqus built it this way.

I hard-coded the Disqus URL in my theme (Both Hexo and Hugo) but then realized I can’t do the same for Google Analytics. I needed a way to disable it altogether. The fix turned out to be quite simple.

Read More - Disable Google Analytics While Running Hugo Test Server