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for the servers
Thursday, June 16 2016
At The Organization, I work mostly in the deep backend of their technology infrastructure. My concerns are chiefly with the stability and functionality of databases and web servers, the integrity of their data, and the utility of their in-house tools (in other words, it's kind of my dream job). Most of the questions that are asked of me are only modestly technical to completely non-technical in nature, and when I'm asked them, it's almost always to ask if there are technical challenges or scalability issues. It's generally understood that, to the extent I am an advocate, it is for the servers. So a couple weeks ago when I was asked if it was okay to include animated GIFs in email blasts, I couldn't see why that would be a problem. Such images would be served from a CDN (that is, a content-delivery network, a distributed series of servers designed to serve media and lessen the burden to the servers that render web pages and may also contain databases), so the server wouldn't care how big the embedded images would be. After I gave an endorsement to the idea, some production team went and produced an animated GIF eight megabytes in size. Da, the main guy on the IT team, just about shit himself at the absurdity. While such an embed would have no effect on our server, it was likely to piss off whoever received an email containing it (if they ever even saw it; which, with my email client settings, I for one never would). I hadn't even considered those poor people, but when Da called an emergency meeting in a Google Hangout, I immediately understood the nature of the issue. We resolved to set an overall limit for outgoing emails that included embedded images and also to cc Da on any future email exchanges with the rest of The Organization. Other than that, it was a reasonably-productive day. For example, I made good progress on building an API interface using object-oriented PHP, the biggest single contribution of object-oriented PHP to the site so far.
This evening, I decoded to download some more media with Bittorrent using transmission-dæmon on my trusty VPS (hosted by VPSLink). But I couldn't reach it, not with my transmission client, not with FileZilla, and not even with putty. I logged into the management site and there buttons missing. Hmm, maybe I'd been busted for "infringing content." So then I went through my emails. Sure enough, I found one from VPSLink telling me that XXX had complained and that indeed it looked as if copyrighted material was being hosted in my virtual private server. They hadn't given me a chance to plead my case or remedy the situation; they'd shut down my access and wouldn't let me in because it "contains copyrighted material." (The horror!) Fortunately for me, I had a recent backup of everything of any importance on that virtual server. So I immediately went looking for inexpensive offshore web hosts. I soon found one ("Waveride") that fit the bill. It was based in Amsterdam and offered 50 gigabytes of storage for only five euros a month. That's 2500 percent of the storage for less than I'd been paying VPSLink. Mind you, storage had been the only bad thing about the old hosting plan. Typically I'd only had about a gigabyte of space to work with, which kept me from downloading much more than individual movies (typically 750 megabytes in size) or a few one-hour television episodes (each being around 350 megabytes in size). It only took a few basic flourishes of apt-get to install a whole LAMP stack. The most pressing thing to migrate to the new host was the small website for one of Gretchen's publishers. Unfortunately, the SQL export I'd done for its database didn't bother to escape the single-quotes in the text (I have only myself to blame; I'd written that export functionality). If I hadn't had to manually escape all those quotes, I could've had the whole site moved to its new home within only about a half hour. Instead, it took me about an hour. And it took me another half hour to set up transmission-dæmon. We'll have to see how this new host handles a nastygram from a copyright owner, but I'll probably be more vigilant about deleting content from the server after I download it it to my local machine. In any case, it's much easier than it used to be (either because of my increased experience or because of technological changes) for me to pick up and move to a new host.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160616 feedback
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