About Us

A. J. Lill Consultants, located in Waterloo Region, provides contract consulting and systems administration services in the Linux and Networking fields

Tiny ceph

Submitted by ajlill on Fri, 07/29/2016 - 14:58

Why CEPH

Ceph was designed to provide reliable high-performance storage at the petabyte scale, and a lot of the tools and documentation reflect that bias. I don't have petabytes of data, but I do have terrabytes of data spread across  a couple of dozen filesystems on three physical hosts, along with a dozen VMs that I'd like to be able to migrate without having to manually copy disk images. I decided to give CEPH a try.

Drupal 8 migration, revisited

Submitted by ajlill on Mon, 07/25/2016 - 19:28

I was having some weird problems with my migrated site.

First off, I was getting a number of

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 81 bytes) in /home/drupal/vendor/twig/twig/lib/Twig/Error.php on line 214

or similar errors on bogus urls to the album photos module and to certain attack probes. These attack probes were urls like

http://edu.ajlc.waterloo.on.ca/photos/album/86/http:/http:/http:/http:/http:/http:/Tutoring?page=4&limit=5

Fixing OSSEC issues

Submitted by ajlill on Fri, 07/15/2016 - 18:23

Just finished an upgrade of ossec from 2.7.1 to the latest 2.8.3. I'll skip the rant about projects that use homegrown install scripts that assume you are going to compile their software on every host, since I went through the headache of reverse-engineering that mess long ago and the anger has subsided!

Hit a few problems, or perhaps they were always there and I never noticed.

First I got

2016/07/15 17:07:33 ossec-remoted: WARN: Duplicate error:  global: 1, local: 3846, saved global: 2464, saved local:8074

Migration to Drupal 8

Submitted by ajlill on Fri, 07/01/2016 - 12:11

I finally bit the bullet and  upgraded my websites to Drupal 8. For this website, the original was a bunch of static, hand-written html pages that hadn't been updated on over a decade, so this was more of an abandonment. My other site, Tony's Education Website, was a Drupal 6 site using a number of modules that had fallen out of maintenance. This is also my first serious go-around with Debian Jessie, and the notorious systemd. More about that in another post.