This holiday weekend was very busy for the IndependentComputing.biz server. Changes were made to beef up the security and performance of the server. Unexpectedly I found out that those changes broke some of the system configurations. Needless to say after two
reinstalls of the OS, things were back up and running. It is a great lesson ones learns when you try to get something working but you can't figure out why everything you do is not fixing the problem. Then you decide to change the one thing that you were sure was correct and then magically your problem is fixed! Like I said great lesson, because it forces you to troubleshoot and experiment to find a solution for your problem.
One of the improvements that was made, was in the way the Blog web application was started. Now using Systemd service file, I get fault tolerance, native system logging, and better processes stats. This was the whole reason for the weekend project in the first place. Another improvement was making a standard process for creating new web applications and servers. I have learned the valuable lesson of staying organized as my workflows were all over the place. I was really just reinventing the whole process each time I went through it. Now with a standard way to handle new websites or servers, it will be much easier
and cleaner when I tackle next weekends project, more on that latter.