Reclaim’s Fantastic Four

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Reverend

Yesterday was a special day, Reclaim Hosting grew to four full-time employees with the hiring of Meredith Fierro. Four is the perfect number for a super group, wouldn’t you agree? Needless to say, the costumes are on order. Meredith worked as an intern in Spring, a part-time employee over the Summer, and as of yesterday we made it official. Meredith will be focusing on support, and she is already bringing some of that Digital Knowledge Center magic to Reclaim. Our timing was perfect given this Fall has been quite busy, but I believe we’re handling it like, well, spandex-clad super heroes. 

Anyway, I was thinking about our group, and something struck me—we all have something in common: ds106. That’s right, everyone at Reclaim Hosting has been through ds106 at least once. So we have that going for us. It was never an articulated requirement of the job, but I can’t imagine the experience hurts. What’s more, Paul Bond and Bill Generaux are teaching a comic book themed version of the course currently, so I think I need to explore the Reclaim super hero theme a bit more. Ds106 is always good for those blog stats 🙂  At the very least I need to do an animated comic book cover assignment, and there are some relevant ones out there when it comes to the Fantastic Four. 

Anyway, all by way of saying welcome to Reclaim Meredith, and it might be time to make some super hero art, dammit.

Posted in digital storytelling, reclaim | Tagged , | Leave a comment

“Older Posts” Problems for Older WordPress Hacks

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Reverend

An Old WordPress Hack

Last week Jess Reingold reached out to us at Reclaim about some issues with UMW Blogs (she’s not dead yet!). The “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” links at the bottom of the main blog pages (not individual posts) were gone. That’s a new one for me, and given I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting WordPress for more than a decade I was confident it was either a theme or a plugin issue. After a quick theme test to see if it was theme related, it became apparent it was across all themes on all blogs, which pretty much narrowed it down to plugins. Easy enough, I waited until early Thursday morning (living in the future a definite bonus when playing a sysadmin on TV) to grab a snapshot of the site  before starting to test my plugin theory.  I turned off plugins: nada. I then turned off mu-plugins: nada. I then turned off mu-plugins and plugins: nada². What was a simple fix was now starting to seem like anything but, we replaced the main WordPress files given it started to smell like a core file problem: nada. WTF!

Friday was a beast of a day at Reclaim, one of those it rains it pours days with server issues and hacked sites, so I had to put off further testing until early Saturday morning. In the interim Jess reported back that the posts in the Dashboard where not all listing. So, when you go to get a list of posts, it breaks after 5 with no pagination. So, another pagination problem, which seemed connected, and as Tim noted, points to a database issue. Ugh. Saturday morning I took another snapshot and went through all the steps again just to be certain (turning off plugins, various themes, etc.). I then fixed permissions across the site, and even prayed a couple of Rosaries to avoid having to dig into SQL commands in terminal. Nothing doing. So,  I then turned towards checking, analyzing, and repairing any corrupted database tables. As my luck would have it, there were none to be found. As I told  Tom Woodward Monday morning in a back channel seeking help with this issue, “I am beginning to question everything” 🙂

So, I did the responsible thing and described my problem in detail and posted it to the WordPress.org Forum.  It went something like this:

Hello,

I have an odd issue that has been giving me agita all weekend. The issue is that the “Older Posts” link usually at the bottom of every blog’s frontpage across the WPMS is missing. I tried replacing core files, turning off all plugins (including mu-plugins and network activated plugins), as well as turning off and toggling through various themes. None of this worked.I turned on debugging and have been looking at the log, but nothing obvious jumps out at me.

To make matters worse, a separate (but possibly related issue?) issue cropped up at the same time. I can only view 5 posts in the Posts area of the Dashboard, after that it stops and there is again no pagination. This is not the case with the Pages area of the dashboard, mind you. It is pretty strange, and not sure if the two are related, but figured it may mean something to someone.

I searched the web, asked my local network, and now turn to the oracles of the WordPress forums. Folks did suggest the second issue may be database related given it is in the dashboard, so I checked and repaired the global database for this WPMS, but nothing seems to have changed.

Not sure if anyone here has come across a similar issue and has some recommendations, but at this point I would appreciate just about anything, even if just commiseration—misery love virtual company.

Best,
Jim

Damn, I am eloquent and engaging.  WHAT A VOICE! Anyway, I then linked that Forum post on Twitter to bump it a bit, and within minutes the great Ron Rennick asked if I had updated the SharDB plugin on that site.

I have known Ron for a pretty long time now, and he has bailed me out of one issue after another with as much graciousness as one would think humanly possible. He might be the biggest reason Stephen Downes forgot about why everyone loves Canada so much. My inclination was to go to Ron first, but when you go to a well so many times you wonder if you left any water in it, but as I soon found over Ron’s cup runneth over with generosity. within minutes he solved my issue.  I updated the latest version of SharDB db-settings.php and db.php and the problem was fixed. So good. 

How did I miss this? To borrow from my discussion with Tom Woodward again, db-settings.php is in the root folder and db.php is in wp-content, but “naked in the nether realm of wp-content” —it is easy to overlook plugins like that. And while I did consider SharDB as a potential issue, I immediately ruled it out given the plugin page says it hasn’t been updated for over 3 years. Stupidly, I did not look at the development page, if I had I would have caught there have been bug fixes for just this issue:

2.8.1

  • Fix MySQL FOUND_ROWS() support used for pagination.
  • Fix warnings.

2.8

  • Add PHP7 support.
  • Fix warnings.
  • Test with WP 4.8

It was funny, because in the few minutes after writing the forum post and Ron pointing out my issue, I sent a note to Jess explaining why it was still not fixed, and the idea was floated that UMW Blogs may be approaching retirement. UMW Blogs and I have a long history, and I am not entirely objective about it, to say the least, but I was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t right. That said, I likened UMW Blogs to the Millennium Falcon noting she may have one more jump to light speed. Soon after that, Chewbacca growled and Ron heard the cry! When I reported back that we had once again avoided the LMS’s imperial tractor beam, she just sent this 🙂

So, after all that it was a plugin issue. So in some ways I was right, but simply being right didn’t solve my issue because usually things are more complicated than that. There is a history to any given problem that often takes many people to solve. In that regard, it never fails to amaze me who quickly things get fixed once I climb out of my head and share it with others. The social web is not social media, it’s us—and we are not dead yet.

Posted in UMW Blogs, WordPress, wpmu | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Going Rate for Sponsorship on the bava

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Reverend

I can’t let Alan Levine have all the fun with his curt responses to folks seeking paid advertising on his blog. I get similar emails regularly, and the one I got today offered me $30 for each sponsored spot, with as many as 5 all told. $150 dollarinis. But I’ve never been one to sell myself short, so I’ve a new proposal for all those seeking sponsorships, which I just shared with my inquiring friend. I will leave my response here for posterity and link to it for all future inquiries. These are my terms for sponsorship on bavatuesdays, and they are non-negotiable (except, of course, by me):

A***y,
I take no less than $100K a spot, and it has to be in unmarked bills sent to an agreed upon Nigerian address.

Will send more details once you commit by sending your bank details along with a scanned copy of your license and SS card.

Looking forward to doing business together.

I think its only fair given the time and energy I have put into this blog, in fact it is quite cheap. And I am more than ready to make this deal with any interested parties. And I promise, this is not a scam 🙂 

Posted in bavatuesdays | 2 Comments

Multiple Hosting Accounts made easy for Domains

Posted on September 4, 2017 by Reverend

One of the things Tim has been working on lately that has me excited is deeper API integration between WordPress and cPanel. This Spring we migrated and are now hosting Princeton’s cPanel offerings. Additionally, Tim has been working on some custom integrations for their existing setup. They have 3 distinct cPanel server instances that provided their community members with a personal account, department account, and/or dev account.

We use WHMCS (the client management software for cPanel servers) to automate account creation which is something Princeton was not using previously. So rather than using a separate WHMCS instance for each service, Tim wanted to run them all through one WHMCS instance. So when you logged into WHMCS the system would be able to determine what kind of account you have (department, dev, and/or personal) and which type you do not, allowing you to sign-up for more than one flavor. For example, in the screenshot above I can login to my Dev account, or sign-up for a personal or departmental account. What’s more, when you are in a particular cPanel account, you can switch between accounts/servers seamlessly:

Why this might matter is one of the features we get asked for a lot is how folks using domains can get more than one cPanel account. Up and until now we had to use the Reseller workaround, which is a fairly onerous manual setup, and has been recently causing some issues. Thanks to Tim’s awesomeness, we can now allow Domain admins at the various schools to create additional accounts without any extra work in cPanel. Essentially, Tim is using the API calls to WHMCS and cPanel to create the new account as well as the reseller dropdown within the account. This is very cool because hopefully we should soon be able to make this part of the basic Domain’s setup.

Since we have been able to build capacity at Reclaim there’s been a bit more time for us to turn to other concerns like infrastructure updating and development. The intensity that was 2016/2017 was a good thing, but there is a challenge to growth. All work and no play makes Reclaim a dull company. Luckily we have hired extremely well, and that’s starting to pay off just when we need it most. Tim can return to some of the experimental development work; Lauren can start to learn the intricacies of DoOO setups; Meredith can continue mastering the complexities of support; and I can blog, dammit 😉

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Carless in Trento

Posted on September 2, 2017 by Reverend

One of the things that we were reflecting on this morning was that we’ve been carless for the entirety of our almost two years in Trento. We used Antonella’s mom’s car on and off the first year, as we tried to carry the house in Virginia while living in Trento. Ironically, by the time we sold the house a car did not seem so much a necessity anymore. We had gotten used to managing for more than a year with riding the bus, walking the kids up to school (no mean feat), and borrowing a car from time-to-time.

Image credit: il Dolomiti

By the beginning of the second year we decided to started using Trento’s Car Sharing program, which has actually changed our life here in some subtle and pretty powerful ways. To be honest, Antonella was pushing for car sharing from the beginning, but I was tepid at best. I did not like the idea of having to share a car (I am an American after all), and was pretty set on buying something, but after a car-free year I was getting convinced. So, we decided not to buy a car and give car sharing a go in earnest. It’s been 8 or 9 months on the car sharing tip, and I’m a believer. Antonella, as usual, has won me over 🙂

Car sharing here works like this, you sign-up for the service (which is subsidized by the province of Trento) and you’re given a card that can open a variety of cars parked around the city. You have an online app and you reserve the car of your choice for a pre-determined amount of time, and off you go. You pay by the hour, but will be charged a bit extra if you go over a certain amount of kilometers. It works out to anywhere from 3-7 euros an hour depending on the car. This is probably how most car sharing setups work, but it was new to me so I figured I’d share. The thing that proved to be the real difference-maker is that both gas and insurance are included—and given the price of gas in Italy (about $6 a gallon) that is not a trivial bonus.

There are a few reasons why car sharing was revolutionary for us, but I’ll start with the most practical of the three: money! We spend a third of what we did in Virginia on a car. And that is with fairly heavy usage of car sharing in the last 8 months, including a few long trips to the mountains, nearby cities, etc. You can choose what size car you want, which directly effects the price. The nice thing is you control how much you pay, so if times are tight, you just don’t use it that day, week, month, etc. So, it’s like we have a new car (or several) that we pay far less for.†

The other side effect of car sharing that I didn’t expect was the health implications. In that same 8 months I have averaged walking 6 miles a day, which is a huge shift in my life. I lost weight, feel better overall, and no longer hide under the covers when it’s time to walk the kids to school up 25 flights of stairs. On the health front, not owning a car has been huge bonus, and it is now baked into my daily life. If I want to do anything locally I basically hit the pavement and start walking. Defaulting to walking rather than driving has paid huge dividends beyond the dollars and cents argument for not having a car. In fact, I think this element has been far more valuable in many respects.

Lastly, I’ll avoid any claims that I am saving the environment, especially given I’ve flown all over creation this year. But not owning a car could earn me some righteousness points on the environmentalism front if I ever wanted to play that card. Just think about it, I could say shit like, “It’s Global Warming, dammit, and I’m doing my part to combat this persistent evil by not even owning a car! What the hell have you ever done?! —you lame-ass Subaru-driving hippie!” The ability to say that might be the truest and bestest reason for being carless in Trento. Forza, bava, forza!

†Keep in mind, however, none of this would be possible if there wasn’t a solid bus system in Trento that was well-funded, on-time, and ran regularly seven days a week. Public services for the win!

Posted in Italy, Reclaim Italy | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Give it Up for Let’s Encrypt

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Reverend

As I awake from my relative blog slumber this Summer, there are a couple of things (actually a lot of things) I’ve been meaning to blog about. (And luckily I even have a new soundtrack to blog by now thanks to CogDog.) Let’s Encrypt passed a pretty big Milestone in June with 100 million SSL certifications issued in less than two years. In a moment where there’s no shortage of nightmare stories around web security, surveillance, and hacking, Let’s Encrypt seems to be one of the few genuine feel-good stories of the web. A joint-effort, non-profit organization designed to make the web safer by providing free and open SSL certificates. A simple and much needed development that has changed the web dramatically. According to Let’s Encrypt:

Percentage of HTTPS Page Loads in Firefox.

When Let’s Encrypt’s service first became available, less than 40% of page loads on the Web used HTTPS. It took the Web 20 years to get to that point. In the 19 months since we launched, encrypted page loads have gone up by 18%, to nearly 58%. That’s an incredible rate of change for the Web. Contributing to this trend is what we’re most proud of.

An impressive bump for security on the web!  Tim rolled out the Let’s Encrypt early on Reclaim Hosting, and when the plugin for cPanel came out we started running it immediately. So, for that same period of time we have been providing SSL certificates by default for our new shared hosting users, combined with free ID Protect I would say the Reclaim web is a bit safer and less scammy/spammy as a result. Focused projects like this are worth 100 million think-pieces on Medium.

They followed up the 100 million post in June, with the announcement of plans for free Wildcard Certificates in January 2018:

Let’s Encrypt will begin issuing wildcard certificates in January of 2018. Wildcard certificates are a commonly requested feature and we understand that there are some use cases where they make HTTPS deployment easier. Our hope is that offering wildcards will help to accelerate the Web’s progress towards 100% HTTPS.

This is big news for us because Wildcard certificates are not cheap currently, and by making them free we can actually provide Domain of One’s Own schools that run subdomains (such as jimgroom.stateu.org) automatic SSL certificates for all accounts. We could provide SSL certificates for subdomains before this announcement, but it was not automatic. Folks would need to manually enable the option, but with a free wildcard cert it can be automated at sign-up. This is huge for us, and they announced it during their Summer fundraising campaign so folks would donate given they are entirely funded by donations and sponsorships

The need for SSL is even more pressing these days given Chrome 56 marks all sites without SSL as “Not Secure” -including this one. In fact, I have to overhaul my WordPress Multisite setup from which bavatuesdays is running to comply, so I need to both practice what I preach and get bavatuesdays resolving on SSL as well as donate to Let’s Encrypt. If you have some spare change hanging around you should too!

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Come and Play with Us, Danny Revisited

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Reverend

In 2010, a six year old Miles discovered the creepy twins from The Shining in a Northern Virginia pizza joint.

Almost 7 years later the twins have returned in the form a custom-made Shining t-shirt Antonella bought for me on my return home from Australia. And when I put it on things got even creepier. A 12 year old Miles is now behind the camera, and what he sees you can never unsee!

Posted in fun | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

bava 3003

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Reverend

There are some benefits to being a long distance blogger, namely tracking your thinking over time and racking up posts. A couple of weeks ago I published by 3000th blog post. I didn’t realize that until today, but it’s a milestone in my almost 12 years of blogging. I’ve averaged 21.297 posts a month and 4.55 comments per post over the last 141 months. I have 3341 broken links of a total 37,589 links. This space tracks not only my erratic thinking and random numbers, but endless hours of  laughing, stewing, and sharing. It’s been fun work overall. My commitment to the bava has been pretty consistent for the last 12 years, and this past summer is the first time I slowed things down considerably. I have enjoyed a bit of a break from the everydayness of the web more generally the last couple of months, but the semester is here and I need to get energized.

So, as I publish my 3003rd post on the bava, it’s a good time to remember this blog is the closest thing I will ever have to a comprehensive record of the work I’ve done. No social media outlet closing or changing its terms of service or restructuring their business model will change that. Bavatuesdays is my little corner of the web, and I like that fact very much. Until death do us part.

Posted in bavatuesdays | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Reaction Time is a Factor

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Reverend

I was playing with our video camera earlier this summer showing Miles how to use the tripod, shoot with various lenses, framing, etc. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s always fun to play with video. Anyway, for some reason I decided to try a poorly improvised scene from Bladerunner when Holden interrogates Leon. As usual, my memory served me poorly given how badly I butchered the original dialogue, but it was mercifully short and fun to do. 

Posted in fun, movies, video | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Retiring Bad Brains

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Reverend

While I am blogging about servers, we recently retired Reclaim’s very first institutional Domain of One’s Own server: Bad Brains. It had been a workhorse with more that 3 years of service and over 1400 cPanel accounts. It holds a special place in our history because it was the first DoOO institutional server setup Tim built at Reclaim. It’s easy to forget three short years and 60+ schools later that expanding Domain of One’s Own to other schools was a dream vision. The idea that just two people could extrapolate and support what we did with Hippie Hosting and UMW Domains to numerous schools and thousands of people was never a given. We white knuckled much of those first two years, and we remain grateful that the University of Oklahoma gave us that early opportunity—there is no question they (along with Davidson College and Channel Islands) helped legitimize Reclaim early on. And three years later with over 5000 users and 5 servers neither of us has looked back. Thanks Mark and Adam, you rule!

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