Tagged with 'mistakes'

Exporting Full MySQL Database Tables on Ubuntu

• August 19, 2024
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, security, tech

...or, How I Suffered Through an 'If it Can Go Wrong, it Will Go Wrong' Scenario for a One-Off Export of Database Tables

This is one of those posts I'm writing up because in the moment I was so incredibly frustrated about how unnecessarily complex this action was, and I still have the various browser tabs that ultimately provided me the necessary bits open. I write this mostly for Future Me should I need to do something like this again.

Manually Pointing Windows Activation At Alternate KMS Host

• July 08, 2024
• 4 minutes
• mistakes, tech

If you work with a lot of disparate dev and test devices across different domains, tenants, etc., you might run into the sort of Windows activation issue I encounter. In particular, when I'm doing dev/test work using physical hardware in my lab space (for things like OSD or OSDCloud), these machines wind up managed by my dev/test tenants/environments, and thus not pointing at our production KMS server for Windows activation.

Hotend Thermistor With A Silpat, Revisited

• December 04, 2023
• 3 minutes
• 3d printing, mistakes, tech

I decided to post a quick follow-up to the original fix I'd implemented about ten months ago.

The $1M question was...

Addressing Firmware Updates for Dell Latitude 54X0 in a Task Sequence

• April 24, 2023
• 8 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, powershell, security, tech

For about two years we fought with getting firmware (BIOS) updates to install on our Dell Latitude 54X0 models during their build/rebuild using a MEMCM task sequence. No matter what random trick I tried or thing I read, I just couldn't get the update executable to successfully apply the update in our primary build/refresh task sequence. Our techs (self included) would have to apply the update manually after devices were [re]built.

Upgrading All The Things to Ubuntu 22.04

• February 13, 2023
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, php, security, tech

One of my "winter break" projects this year was to get all of my disparate Ubuntu server instances upgraded and into parity. Last year I wrote about my adventure moving WSL Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, which happened before 22.04 was officially released. In that process I noted the longer-term target of moving to 22.04 which brings us to the here and now!

Mister Thermistor, Fixed With a Silpat

• January 30, 2023
• 8 minutes
• 3d printing, inspiration, mistakes, personal, tech

I got hooked into 3D printing late last summer. A problem that cropped up after the first couple months of tinkering and relatively error-less printing was an issue with thermal runaway. Something I could correct for short periods of time, but never make totally go away...

Upgrading an Old Application to 21st Century Passwords

• June 13, 2022
• 7 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, php, security, tech

I have a confession to make: I've ignored a Really Bad Password Form on an inherited web application for about at least a decade too long.

I'm not proud, but every time I considered changing the password mechanism to something more modern (and more secure), decision paralysis would set in...in great part due to the design challenges I anticipated in quietly upgrading this for users of the app in question.

In-Place Upgrade of WSL Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04

• April 25, 2022
• 5 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, php, security, tech

About two months back (early March to be exact), I had the opportunity to finally deprecate some old versions of applications and packages due to planned retirements and upgrades. Most specifically a full-on move to PHP 7.4 was in sight, though there were other bits. I run and have access to a bunch of different environments so it felt right to get environments back to a standard (or at least closer) base configuration.

Date Math is Gross

• November 08, 2021
• 3 minutes
• automation, mistakes, php, tech

This year, I'm working with/mentoring a paid intern on a device monitoring project for a portion of our fleet. These sort of projects are always fun and meaningful in that we identify a problem or opportunity to improve, and then solve said problem in a way we've not done before. It works out well for everyone involved because we get an improved process or "thing," the intern gains some practical experience and skills (often with stuff they've never encountered), and the intern gets paid to boot.

Breaking the Chain: An Edge Case of Let's Encrypt Root Certificate Expiration

• September 27, 2021
• 6 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, security, tech

It's been written about and announced for some time—the forthcoming expiration of the DST Root CA X3 certificate. The good news for most folks is that it's not a big deal. And that, I thought, also included me. For the most part, this has panned out to be true.

Undo the Undo -- A Short Tale of a Git Mistake

• August 23, 2021
• 3 minutes
• mistakes, tech

I had one of those "Oh shit, Git!" moments this past weekend...

Mine was that I made a necessary change, and since it was pretty minor (really a typo fix of sorts) I just went ahead and did it in the main branch. NBD. Commit, push, and pull on the remote host, and all is good.

Whoops! Cleaning up Mistakes via API

• August 09, 2021
• 5 minutes
• automation, inspiration, mistakes, php, tech

Posting again after kind of a lengthy break. It's summertime, and for lots of disparate reasons I've queued up topics but haven't had the ambition or taken the time to write them all out. So today we get a tale of automation mistakes and the subsequent cleanup.

Reinstalling reCAPTCHA

• June 21, 2021
• 2 minutes
• automation, drupal, mistakes, security, tech, website

In the last post I wrote about finally cutting off the comments feature due to an abundance of spam.

For about two days, this was successful...

Comments No More

• June 07, 2021
• 2 minutes
• drupal, mistakes, tech, website

Well, the time has come...to shut down post comments. Presumably for good.

When I rebooted the site in Drupal a couple of years back, I'd waffled over whether or not to leave post comments enabled. It seemed like an okay idea, but at the same time would they just become a sea of comment spam? At the time of the site reboot, though, I chose not to maintain an active direct contact ("contact us") form due to other technical limitations at the time. So comments seemed an appropriate balance.

Cleaning Up Old Mistakes Part Deux: Leveraging Includes

• May 10, 2021
• 4 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, security, tech

This post is the second of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part one discusses cleaning up Git repos based on permissions faux pas.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Using centralized/standard "includes" for path variables and eliminating passwords from committed code.

Cleaning Up Old Mistakes: Git Repos With Nested Accounts

• April 26, 2021
• 6 minutes
• inspiration, mistakes, tech

This post is the first of a two-part miniseries identifying and correcting old mistakes. Part Deux is also available.

Today's atonement for old mistakes: Git repos used in production in which nested/disparate accounts run code.

Low-Budget "CI/CD"

• January 27, 2020
• 3 minutes
• tech, website, mistakes

A client project had a database server upgrade in early December, and as I eluded to in a different post from around that time, Git was the shit when it came to making my angle of that migration go smoothly. Past Me made Current Me's life a lot simpler.

Letting It Go

• January 20, 2020
• 5 minutes
• personal, mistakes

Last summer we had a pretty gnarly hailstorm, which has ultimately resulted in the need to replace shingles and siding on the house (among several other things). As a result, this has become a launching point for getting some insulation work and window replacement on the project list. Because if we're gonna do the siding, we might as well get those other things done, too.

Tales From The 'Duh!' Archive: Command Syntax

• November 11, 2019
• 2 minutes
• tech, powershell, mistakes

I had a very long week, which means I'm writing a short post this time around.

Among several seemingly disparate things I accomplished in the last week or so, I spent some time deploying applications via SCCM (soon to be called Microsoft Endpoint Manager/Configuation Manager/#MEMCM per the announcement at Ignite this week).

Environment Context Troubleshooting

• August 12, 2019
• 5 minutes
• powershell, automation, mistakes

Broken Context(s). The story of my weekend project.

Due to a number of reasons, mostly well outside my direct control, I spent part of this weekend working through the application and task sequence refresh process for our multi-user workstations...which will need to be finished by August 27.

Does the Performance Matter?

• April 01, 2019
• 4 minutes
• powershell, tech, automation, mistakes, inspiration

Back around 2015 or so, I wrote a simple Powershell script which basically re-populates Active Directory (AD) group membership based on data procured from our central systems. Two primary AD groups in particular are synchronized to our print management system, PaperCut, which pre-provisions accounts and access so folks handling monetary transactions don't have to create accounts, etc.

I Own You, Drupal View!

• March 11, 2019
• 6 minutes
• drupal, website, tech, mistakes

As I tweeted about in victory a week ago, I managed to finally get my Drupal taxonomy term view(s) to do what I wanted:

I _finally_ managed to get that Drupal taxonomy term view to generate what I want, the way I want it (TL;DR: term value, content filter, and a complex relationship). Only took a few weeks of casual/off-and-on attempts to figure it out! pic.twitter.com/ks7qqZfc73

"Just Reload It"

• February 15, 2019
• 1 minute
• website, mistakes, drupal

I needed to fix a library-level theme item. And since it's been a while since I last made a change like that (this was all before the original switch to the production Drupal instance), I couldn't remember if it involved uninstalling/reinstalling the theme...or simply clearing the cache.

So I chose the heavy-handed option. What could possibly go wrong, right?

WRONG.

I'm certainly glad I don't have a lot of super-customized stuff (other than some titles and custom block layout stuff to place), because I had to do it all over again.