Digitalocean review

Posted on March 15, 2013 by v.

Being a web developer with clear lamp preference, I believe it was a trivial task for ad servers to target digitalocean.com ads at me. Those ads are just all over the net. In my gmail, on my basecamp account, my facebook wall… If I had a display on my fridge, I guess the ad would have been there, too.

Clearly, I think that $13.99 for .com domain and $107.88 for year worth of shared hosting account is, well, a bit more than I used to pay for the same thing couple of years ago. And yes, with so many new (software) platforms and tools to play with, it’s quite cool to have a VPS of my own.

I’ve tried partnering a colleague with a server, but I shortly found out that our expectations from a VPS were a bit different. I mean – besides all the cool stuff I could try on such VPS, I still believe that hosting this blog (with all the uptime in the world) shouldn’t be at risk.

That’s when the ads mentioned above started tickling my imagination. Imagine that! 512MB RAM 20GB SSD VPS for $5/month! First of all, I wanted to know if it’s just another fraud that just tries to steal your cc or whatever. I thought that result from http://www.scamadviser.com/is-digitalocean.com-safe.html was good enough to give it a try.

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Posted in Hardware, Infrastructure, Software Development, Tools | 1 Comment

How to disable automatic upgrades on Ubuntu server?

Posted on March 12, 2012 by v.

One of the common arguments against using open source software in production is that it’s always changing, and you never know when an upgrade will break some feature or dependency. Despite the fact that Ubuntu people are trying to keep the stuff as stable as possible, this argument unfortunately holds.

That’s exactly why I decided to never run apt-get update followed by apt-get upgrade on this particular ubuntu server machine. It serves an intranet, and it’s hardly ever expected to be compromised by a security issue, either.

Unfortunately, this was not enough, and of course I’ve learned it when my Redmine started crashing with Internal Server Error 500. I just wanted a system that works. Not a system that I must continuously work on in order to keep it up and running. A quick research proved that a Ruby-related upgrade happened, and the only at the moment available workaround of restarting apache until Redmine works again was not good enough. Continue reading →

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Thread was being aborted / IIS Application Pool Idle Time-out (minutes) Setting

Posted on January 31, 2012 by v.

Idle Time-out (minutes)

[idleTimeout] Amount of time (in minutes) a worker process will remain idle before it shuts down. A worker process is idle if it is not processing requests and no new requests are received.

So, if you are after an architecture that collects and queues requests in order to process them in a separate thread, make sure this thread is not running past this setting.

Otherwise, you might get Thread was being aborted. error.

Solution: set Idle Time-out to zero (0), which disables feature that kills w3wp.exe process due to lack of web requests, or make sure that long running threads are kept at safe distance from IIS. The latter would also significantly improve the performance.

Posted in Infrastructure, Software Architecture, Software Development | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

NHibernate: undefined alias or unknown mapping

Posted on December 22, 2011 by v.

I must note that I’ve wasted considerable amount of time on this error message. When copy/pasting, I’ve failed to close a bracket in a HQL query, and even more – the bad expression exceeded the screen space and without an editor that would complain, once again (remember NHibernate “Could not find the dialect in the configuration” “Could not compile the mapping document”) – I was left alone with NHibernate error handling :(. And it did not only complain about query aliases – it complained even about the mostly used mapping names.

The good thing is that I revised my NHibernate mapping knowledge and querying capabilities which turned out to be a great confidence booster. However, I still can’t tell if this is only a problem with an oldish 2.0 NHibernate version or not.

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Command line registry permissions

Posted on November 18, 2011 by v.

Yesterday I’ve done a small change in a deployment script that was supposed to “only” allow write permissions to a registry key values.  I’ve had little luck with regini.exe and cacls.exe, so I’ve quickly found a free replacement – setacl.exe. If you need to quickly do something with it – forget the docs – go straight to examples.

However, one thing got me even more – when dealing with windows security trying to support different languages, you’d better know about this (list): Well-known security identifiers in Windows operating systems.

You don’t want to rely on yourself remembering how administrator username is spelled in Spanish or French (or even care about that), do you?

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{“There is an error in XML document (2, 2).”}

Posted on October 1, 2011 by v.

An extremely undescriptive error message took hours of my valuable time. Of course, we are talking about XmlSerializer trying to parse an XML file. What actually happened was that an inherited piece of code caught and ignored this error, while I’ve configured my Visual Studio to break on System exceptions, so it appeared to be a cause of another error!

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Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Git – how to remove remote branch

Posted on September 28, 2011 by v.

Seemingly obvious action got me more than once.
git push origin :branchname
is the way to go.

Of course, I’ve expected something like:
git branch -d origin/branchname
but it wouldn’t work.

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Redmine Email Notifications on Ubuntu 10.04 Server

Posted on August 25, 2011 by v.

Redmine is so cool  issue tracker, that I’ve had to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, even on ubuntu server, where apt-get is supposed to make life easy, it’s by no means trivial to setup.

I’d like to give a suggestion on how to make email notifications work.

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Dangerous Help

Posted on July 27, 2011 by v.
This tool is running with elevated privileges. Navigating to the help content in this situation might constitute a security risk. Run the tool without elevated privileges to reach the help content.

Dangerous Help

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How to turn on IIS logging in Windows 7?

Posted on June 10, 2011 by v.

OK, this was not intuitive at all. I can quickly find page like this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754631(v=ws.10).aspx

And there is nothing linked to it that would give me an idea why I can’t find Logging feature in the place I’m supposed to activate it.

However, “feature” was the keyword. Great puzzle, Microsoft!

You need to go to “Turn Windows features on or off”, then navigate to Internet “Information Services/World Wide Web Services/Health and Diagnostics” and finally you can turn any logging you wish.

No, that’s not all. A good old computer restart had to be done as well.

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