This might be a little bit of a futile message, but I'm having significant issues with the site's stability. This started after I upgraded a set of packages (yum update) and also did some minor Drupal upgrades. I don't believe it's related to the latter, something seems to be not quite right for php-fpm.

Anyway, it is a good lesson on using AWS's options about backups etc.

I upgraded my website over the past few weeks, and it's in better shape than it has been in years.

No more server in the attic

The biggest change was moving to Amazon AWS. After many years of hosting a physical server in the Netherlands in my parent's house, I decided to make the switch. Primarily because I wanted to get some hands-on experience with AWS -- I've learned some good things -- but also because the physical server is getting due for a replacement.

Drupal and CiviCRM upgrades

I removed Drupal modules I no longer needed, upgraded CiviCRM to version 5.9, and finally fixed a lot of bugs. Restored the Birthday block, restored the breadcrumbs. Finally, I set up a way to upload images through the browser and have to resized, renamed and sharpened the way I like it. This was something I missed when we were in St Maarten; it was tricky to add photo's to articles.

Server stuff

For my database I now use Amazon RDS -- no more messing around with MariaDB upgrades, and database backups are trivial. I'm using Let's Encrypt for HTTPS certificates and tweaked my favicon settings for Android and Apple products.

Why?

I've spent quite a few evenings fixing and patching things. It's very rewarding and I love having my own website and blog. To look back at all the years is awe inspiring. Using Drupal also allows me to track things like my running mileage or books that I've read, all in one place.

I moved my blog to EC2 last weekend and last night the instance stopped working for the first time.

"Design for failure", is the mantra, and I'll do some work on automated reboots when monitoring fails.

Seems like the httpd server went ran out of memory last night.

Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 8250 (httpd) score 37 or sacrifice child
Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Killed process 8250 (httpd) total-vm:526616kB,...
Dec 15 00:26:53 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: httpd invoked oom-killer...

I just completed the exam for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, a certificate that shows I have basic knowledge about the different Amazon Web Service offerings.

The exam was relatively easy. I've been preparing for this conference for a while, and done quite a bit of studying on the various AWS products. I did study a few trial exams from Udemy.com, and those were helpful for questions on more basic stuff like the Billing and Support models -- the less technical topics.

Still, it's been a while since I had done an official test and I was a little nervous, and now I'm very happy I passed the test. "Certified individuals" also get access to a special area here at the re:Invent 2018 conference.

The Chrome browser is now explicitly marking non-https websites as Not Secure, a good step for them to take. A few years ago I was a Usenix Conference where the UX folks for Chrome were discussing their roadmap towards this -- time has flown and now http is officially "no good".

A good nudge for me also... I finally set up a HTTPS cert for my site. I've used a free certificate from letsencrypt.org; it will expire in a few months but by then I should be fully running on AWS and have the auto-renewal acme scripts in place.

A few months ago the system I used to filter out spam, Mollom, was discontinued. I signed up with Mollom pretty early on, and it has been a great tool over the years.

I didn't realize that my website was unable to accept comments until Gerben pointed it out -- thank you! -- and the retirement of Mollom turned out to be the issue.

I just switched to another tool called Honeypot, let's see how well that does, and comments should be working again.

To my shame, my website was hacked a while ago and a piece of malware was installed that generated bitcoins.

The firewall at my work and at Ettie's work picked up on the malware and classified the website as "malware", making it unavailable.

I cleaned the malware quickly but it took a while for the firewalls to pick it up. I submitted a request to the firewall maker and that took care of it quickly, so we're back in business.

Hmmm, I'm not very proud of this but it looks like my site has had an open redirect for a good while. Years, in fact.

It's a custom script that I wrote 15 years ago and somehow survived the migration from the various CMS that I've used.

The original script had a reference to Php-Nuke from 2002. I've now removed it, finally.

Today I switched from Firefox to Chrome.

I've been using Firefox since the mid 2000's, when it came out to replace the bulky Mozilla suite. It's with some nostalgia that I'm making the switch, but I've ran into several bugs in Firefox that weren't getting resolved.

(While typing this, I did discover that Chrome does not have auto-recover for text areas, which is annoying but thankfully there is a browser extension Typio that helps).

The nail in the coffin was the release of Firefox Quantum last year, when they stopped supporting XUL plugins. I understand the rationale -- but it broke several important plugins, including all those for mass-password reset. In the six months since the switch there haven't been any new plugins written that allow me to change all my 100+ work logins at once.

Firefox also did not work when I was presenting something under WebEx. That might have been WebEx's problem -- but it's annoying enough since I screen-share at least once a day.

So here we are, in a brave new world,

For our college recruitment I gave a tech talk at Carnegie Mellon University last week. It was fun talking with students. They were younger than I remember. It seems like my talk went over quite well, and at the end I gave them my three pieces of advice for looking for jobs: 1. Work where the firm makes its money, 2. Your supervisor is very important. When looking for a job, try to interview her/him as much as possible, 3. Do the hard things. In college: take the hard courses. At work: investigate the hard problems. Be the go-to-person.

The next morning I went for a run downtown, crossing all three rivers. Pittsburgh is a beautiful city.

I drove to Pittsburgh from Arlington -- about 4 hours clean driving time.