I like to apply Test Driven Development to my sysadmin work. For example, every time I add a new redirect to a web server configuration I want to make sure I haven’t broken anything else. Further, I want my SSL configurations proactively checked daily for any possible error. I use Ruby RSpec and write tests…More
Tag Archives: sysadmin
Linode vs. DigitalOcean: back to Linode for me
DigitalOcean doesn’t give their first-line support people the necessary tools to diagnose their own system problems. And so a two-day outage becomes possible. The night before Christmas, I was scrambling to get my site back up On the afternoon of the 24th, my New Relic monitor told me that weblaws.org (now public.law) was offline. Ugh.…More
“There are two kinds of websites: the quick and the dead.”
The Hidden Dangers of Beautiful Themes
Some of the best-designed and officially featured WordPress themes aren’t built to handle mid-volume traffic. Just one incoming link from a semi-popular page can take your server down. A New Blog for a Web App Everything started out smoothly. Like thousands of developers do every day, I set up a new WordPress installation to support…More
Check your web server configuration with ruby test cases
I’m releasing a new open source library, HTTP-Assertions, that I use behind the scenes at OregonLaws.org. It helps me keep the server running smoothly and make sure that my changes to the config files haven’t introduced new bugs. It introduces these new assert methods to the Rails testing environment: assert_200 assert_forbidden assert_temp_redirect_to assert_perm_redirect_to Here’s an…More
Dogweather 