Adventures in IT

While debugging and setting up Puppet I am still running the agent and master from CLI in --no-daemonize mode.  I kept getting an error on my agent - ""Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled". The fix was quite simple and a little embarrassing.  Firstly I forgot to run my puppet master with root privileges which meant that it was unable to write incoming certificate requests to disk.  That's the embarrassing part and after I looked at my shell prompt and noticed this issue fixing it was quite simple. Firstly I got the puppet ssl path by running the command   puppet agent --configprint ssldir Then I removed that directory so that my agent no longer had any certificates or requests. On my master side I cleaned the old certificate by running  puppet cert clean --all  (this would remove all my agent certificates but for now I have just the one so its quicker than tagging it). I started my agent up with the command  puppet age...

PostGres is rapidly gaining traction as a solid relational database manager.  It provides transaction reliability (ACID), standards compliance, and has a better reputation for handling large datasets than MariaDB / mySQL. Luckily installing it for Hiphop is painless and there is an externally provided extension for it. There was not a prebuilt package available for the PocketRent/hhvm-pgsql  extension for my version of Hiphop so I built it following the advice in the project readme.  Their instructions worked first time. I did not have success with using the "ini" method of including the extension so had to create a Hiphop configuration file. DynamicExtensionPath = /path/to/hhvm/extensions DynamicExtensions { * = pgsql.so } I placed the snippet they provide (above) into a file called config.hdf in my Hiphop location.  I'm using Mint on my dev box so this was /etc/hhvm/config.hdf for me. Then I edited /etc/default/hhvm and set Hiphop up to...

I've just set up a new nginx host and was having problems with visiting it. Whenever I loaded the page it would download a copy of my index file. In my case the problem was two-fold.  Firstly I had mistyped my server name so it was falling back to an alternative catchall. Secondly Chromium has a "won't fix" bug whereby redirects are cached.  Interestingly the cache also persisted into Incognito mode. Clearing my cache with the "Clear Browsing History" menu function didn't work to clear out the redirect cache.  This gave the symptom of stopping nginx, stopping varnish, and even stopping hhvm but still having Chromium download the file when I tried to visit it. What did work was to affix a get variable to the link.  So instead of visiting http://mysite.local I tried http://mysite.local?foo=1 which invalidated the cache. This wasn't an entirely satisfactory solution so the next thing I tried was to use the developer tools (ctrl shift I) a...

Apache on Centos ships with mod_deflate installed and enabled by default.  To check this you can grep your config file and make sure the line which loads it is not commented out. cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep LoadModule deflate_module When Apache loads it reads all the config files (ending in .conf) in /etc/httpd/conf.d so we'll add configuration options for mod_deflate into this directory. Lets use a file called deflate.conf to specify the config: <IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutput...

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

If you're like me and have a personal Github account but work for a company that also uses Github you will probably want to be able to set up multiple accounts on Github. It's pretty simple to do so: Firstly you need to create a new key for your company account. Make sure that you save it to a file other than the default id_rsa otherwise you'll overwrite your default ssh key. For illustration lets save it to ~/.ssh/id_rsa_alternate ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your-email-address"   Now open up your company account on Github and navigate through the settings to manage your ssh keys.  Use the following command: cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa_alternate.pub   Copy and paste the output into a new key on your company Github account. Next we add the new key to our identity: ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_alternate Edit (or touch) your ssh config file at ~/.ssh/config and include a new option for authenticating using your company account: Host github-COMPANY HostName...

PHP Framework popularity as at 2013 - Sitepoint After having a very good experience with using Varnish to cache a Wordpress site we decided to look at caching Laravel. Laravel always generates cookies regardless of whether a person is logged in or not.  This interferes with Varnish which by default will pass all requests with a cookie to the backend and skip the cache. In our particular case our site supported the ability for users to login and would then present them with custom content.  This means that cookies are not restricted to a particular path so we can't discard cookies based on the request as we did for Wordpress when discarding everything except /wp-admin/* requests. My solution was to use a package called session-monster ( Packagist  ) which sets a response header if the data in the Laravel session can be ignored.  Varnish can detect this header and prevent the cookie from being set since we don't really need it.  This together with t...