Status update, June 2022
Published on July 12, 2022
Table of contents
Personal Infrastructure
My backup server (which stores backups for cyberscore.me.uk and other websites) is at 73% of disk capacity. It’s has a single HDD of 300GB, so I’m replacing it with a 4TB HDD. The server only has one disk bay, so replacing it will be a bit troublesome, but I’ll need to get it done soon.
Cyberscore
I had to fix an outage caused by a corruption on the games table. We were
adding a new column to the start of the table and somehow the data didn’t shift
correctly or something, corrupting practically everything. Thankfully this
table doesn’t get updates often (only when a new game is added to the website),
so restoring it from the daily backup wasn’t a big problem.
A few days prior, we had merged some untested code that broke some things, so I took the opportunity to fix those as well. I also removed a couple of concepts that were no longer used (splits and DLC preferences) that resulted in the removal of ~500 lines of code.
Shortly after fixing the corruption, the disk ran out of space. Now that we don’t scale down submission proofs, they’re taking a lot more disk space than usual. I started by deleting some old local backups to clear up some room just to make the website work again while I figured out the next step.
We’re already storing some of the old proofs on an AWS S3 bucket, so it was time to migrate some more. Uploading things took a while, because I took the opportunity to rename the files to their SHA256 checksum instead of database id. By making them content-addressable, I saved around 6GB of duplicate proofs (sometimes a single screenshot acts as proof for a bunch of charts).
ANSOL
Internally, we use CiviCRM to keep track of memberships, payments and payment reminders. CiviCRM is a very powerful tool, but it hasn’t been working for us. In part, it’s due to the customization it requires and the time we’d have to spend to learn how to use it effectively, but it’s also because we don’t want to maintain the host platform – CiviCRM needs to be applied to a CMS (Drupal, in our case).
We’ve had new membership requests and due payments left without any feedback for weeks because it’s too troublesome to register them. This is not acceptable, so I’m working on a replacement. I’m not sure that this will fix our underlying issue, but I have all the required functionality working so I’ll probably deploy it this week so we can give it a go. It’s basically a spreadsheet with email reminders and an audit log. What could go wrong?