Hi, my name is bava, and I have an Instagram problem.
I never planned to get on Instagram, and I was even less inclined to enjoy it. But 616 posts and 18 months later I’m realizing I am deeper in then I ever intended. I tell myself I can quit anytime, but now that Twitter holds little joy for me and Mastodon feels like a temporary rebound relationship, Instagram has quietly become my go to. My network is mainly friends and family, and I love that alongside an announcement from my nephew on Long Island that he got a Lacrosse scholarship to Stonybrook (go Kevin!) will be an art piece by my dear friends’ daughter in Portland, Oregon. I like those random visual juxtapositions, and I also like that it’s pretty much photos from folks I know. But how did it happen?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BZYKJgDn-k-/
It wasn’t too long ago I was talking smack on Antonella for abandoning Twitter for Instagram while she was working through a knit-along. But then the kids were on Instagram, my nephews and nieces were on Instagram, and when Tim came to Italy in August of 2017 he was posting his photos from the trip almost exclusively on Instagram. That’s when I finally broke down, I remember it well, I was approaching the Vatican, some would say it was an inspired conversion:)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXnzD5oF5aZ/
I have next to no presence on Facebook, and I prefer it that way. I figured it would be the same for Instagram, but given my current hobbies of hiking and taking photos I’m not so sure I will be leaving Instagram anytime soon. I’ve been a Flickr member since 2005, and I have over 17,000 photos on that site. When they recently changed their terms after being acquired by Smugmug I immediately paid the ransom for my photos. I’m by no means surprised at this development, and frankly I would be surprised if anyone was surprised at this in 2018. How long can we feign outrage when these companies repeatedly confirm what we already know, they provide a “free” service in exchange for our data? In fact, I’m not so sure paying Smugmug will mean my data is protected, but handing over that $30 was simply a stop-gap measure to buy some time.
I want to experiment with hosting my photos differently in 2019, and one of the highlights of 2018 I forgot to mention in my last post was seeing the Google Archive team present on their work with the Data Transfer Project at MyData in Helsinki this August. This open source software enables you to move photos between services like Google Photos, Flickr, Instagram, etc. seamlessly, and I would love to see what it would look like to push those photos into a WordPress (or whatever your publishing poison may be) site template with custom post types that could map all the metadata via APIs. It’s Kin Lane stuff for sure, but I was pretty blown away at the demo wherein they pushed all their photos from Flickr to Google Photos, and vice versa. But I am not so interested in moving stuff off of one service to another, because that simply means you have a new landlord to be beholden to, but for me the thrill was the underlying idea of seamless data portability between services that means moving your stuff when things go bad is trivial.
But I digress, this post was supposed to be about my Instagram problem. But really I don’t have an Instagram problem as much as I have a photo problem. I’ve used Flickr as an archive for my photos, as well a sporadic repository for the images in my blog posts, for a while now. I don’t keep up with it regularly, but a few times a year I will make an effort to make the photos I automatically send there through my phone public with a title and occasional description. I also have Dropbox backing up all photos and video on my phone. I am definitely backing up my photos, but Instagram is the only place I am really doing anything with them, i.e. sharing them. I used to do that on Twitter a bit, but they increasingly seem out of place there. As you can see from my top nine above, my photos are mainly of me and my family hiking, snowboarding, traveling, or getting eaten by the fashion shark. There’s a lot of play there, and the story is quotidian and personal—which has by and large been my attraction to the web. [Politics on social media continue to bore me, despite how much I should care.] But the above top 9 is not the true top 9, the true top 9 is the Duke top 9!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BrmkVMplhZA/
Did I mention I got a dog in 2018? But not just any dog, but an Italian Spinone to go with my wardrobe. He’s everything. He was a rescue, and I have already convinced the family that we will be getting a spinone puppy in the spring, I am hooked.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BquX3q7l-an/
I did not realize that what I needed to complete my domestic bliss was a gigantic, shaggy, slobbering beast to accompany me on my daily hikes.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BpCRHvMHwhz/
He’s more like a Yeti than a dog when he finds himself in the Dolemites.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BppofbRlfib/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqZeqxnlpIP/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnoQpBJl26Q/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BpCRHq-HKN2/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqjpwnvlUA8/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BrMt5yrlPMQ/
Duke has made posting that much more fun. I just like sharing the goings on of casa bava’s latest addition. I’m absolutely open to photo sharing alternatives, but until I figure out something better I’ll be continuing to cultivate my Instagram problem with my shaggy beast bestie.
This year has been another solid one at Reclaim Hosting, and while I have some breathing room between semesters I figured I’d try to recap of some the highlights. For a small team we tend to bite off a lot, and I’m over the moon with how much we got done this year, but there’s no question it has been an intense one.
Reclaim Video Signage
The first major project of the year was getting our video store, Reclaim Video, up and running. There was a fair bit of manual labor involved in this process, including a groovy carpet that was almost the death of me. We did most of the work in February and March, and by April we had the official launch of Reclaim Video at OER18 in Bristol which included an unveiling of the website as well as the screening of our first “marketing” video:
The OER18 conference was another highlight for Reclaim given the entire team attended, and we enjoyed the vibe so much it looks like we’ll be heading to Ireland for OER19 this Spring to re-live the glory of our video world premiere.
To top off the Reclaim Video art and video-infused frenzy of the first 5 or 6 months of 2018, we invited Michael Branson Smith to Fredericksburg in June to brainstorm ways to build on top of the Reclaim Video website he designed for us. This led to some playing with Raspberry Pis, animated GIF movie posters, and beefing up the Reclaim Video stereo system. Hanging out with Michael was a definite highlight because he’s always a creative inspiration, and the playful work we did with him that weekend would carry through for us into the second half of 2018 (but more on that anon).
But the first half of 2018 was not all VHS stores and world premieres, we also ran our second (and possibly last) Workshop of One’s Own in Fredericksburg. This workshop had 14 people and was a two-day tour de force, Tim even threw in an escape room. We also brought in Alan Levine to kick off a year-long fellowship to offer SPLOTs as one-click installs through Reclaim’s Installatron (we currently have 5 up and running).
Also of note during the Spring was the talk I gave at Re:publica in May. The conference seemed like a throwback tech conference from the aughts, and I realized then and there that my heart’s not really in the presenting game these days. Part of that is I feel like I’ve said all I need to say on Domains using that format, and the other is I’ve not been all that good at coming up with novel presentations—which means I’m re-hashing. I hope I find my mojo again because I really do enjoy presenting, but between the crunch of my day job and the realization I’ve had more than my fair share of opportunities to present—it might be a good time to lay low and plan my late career comeback in Vegas 🙂 That said, making another guest appearance on Virtually Connecting with Christian Friedrich was a highlight:
I also got to meet an international band of #Edupunx thanks to Twitter and a coffee mug, which I am now in proud possession of 🙂
The last 6 months of 2018 had the same level of intensity, but in different directions. Starting in June we were strongly considering re-developingDomain of One’s Own from the ground up. This meant trying to imagine the experience outside of cPanel and WHMCS entirely in order to build the Domains infrastructure on top of a container-based application framework like Cloudron. It remains a dream, but after spending a few months exploring the requirements and seeing just exactly what this would entail we decided to shelve it for a variety of reasons. Foremost amongst which was the uncertainty of what a container-based, app-driven hosting environment would mean in terms of server resources and costs.
June was also the time when Digital Ocean featured Reclaim in one of their case studies, which was not only awesome but also timely given we would spend much of the Summer of 2018 moving the last of our shared and Domain of One’s Own server fleet to DO. It was a 2-3 year long migration of our infrastructure, but this Summer saw the last of all significant migrations—which was both a huge accomplishment and relief at once. As an added bonus DO cut their pricing significantly to start 2018 which meant we could return the favor to our managed hosting clients—which felt good.
June was also the time Lauren officially moved into the role of Account Manager with the idea that we would be more intentional and pro-active about reaching out to schools. It’s been a learning process trying to manage over 70 schools, but building regularity of communication into our practice has been huge and Lauren has been amazing at this. Moreover, she has also been on-boarding clients, fielding interests from potential schools, setting up servers, and all while answering support tickets. The untold joys of working for a small company 🙂
One of the nice things about 2018 is that we showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, quite the opposite. Part of what made this such an amazing year was seeing a major uptick of interest in our managed hosting for WordPress Multisite, as well as our Professional Services offering. Reclaim has been diversifying a bit beyond Domains and shared hosting, which means we are rounding out well while at the same time remaining focused on what we do well: academic-driven hosting. We’ve also gotten more interest from schools that want us to manage user support for their campus Domains project, which is one reason why our growth has been focused on shoring up the support experience.
We knew if we didn’t hire someone to help out in time for fall it was going to be a heavy workload for all of us, and that proved to be true. We answered upwards of 3200 tickets amongst the 4 of us since August, and I’ll be so bold to say we did an awesome job taking care of the community that takes care of us. That said, I think we’re all ready for a more systematic approach when it comes to support. So the last few months quickly became about devising and hiring a position to run our customer support. We wanted to start with someone who could take what we have and implement a support structure that moves beyond our all hands on deck approach currently so that we can begin to compartmentalize roles a bit more.
But before we hired an employee we did something even better, we hired a consultant. But not just any consultant, a Justin Webb consultant 🙂 For those out there not keeping score, Justin was the CIO at UMW under whom Domain of One’s Own go the green light from IT. His understanding of what DTLT was doing in 2013 was exactly what we needed at the time, and Tim and I have been in touch with Justin ever since we departed UMW. This fall provided an opportunity for us to work together once again, and the immediate needs in September and October was helping us solidify various IT requirements around security, accessibility, and the like. It’s a lot of work to manage those requests, and having a university-trained CIO to consult on these issues has been invaluable. But that was just the beginning, Justin also took over the job search for the Customer Support Manager position, and right before Christmas we officially hired that position—which is a huge win of 2018.
As Reclaim turned five this year the strange realization that we’re not going anywhere has started to settle in. We have a solid customer base; we provide an excellent service at an affordable service; and people continue to come to us at a frequency that’s increasing by the day. Three years ago when I jumped ship at UMW and struck out for the territories, I wondered if we would make it this far. There were some highs and lows, as well as months of feast or famine as we figured out getting paid and managing accounts, but what amazes me as 2018 draws to a close is that we have all that in hand, and everything over the past 6 months points to the fact that we may be on the cusp of a growth spurt—and that is both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking. We continue to lead with support, which is what has distinguished us thus far, and while we’re not actively pursuing new clients, they’re coming regardless. I like that we have grown steadily since 2013 at a pace that has allowed us to move cautiously into broader vistas—and I’d like to see that carry over in 2019. It remains a point of pride that we have not taken any investment money, remaining free to call the shots about what we will and won’t do. That makes Reclaim special for me, I think about the work we do and I can honestly say it’s genuine; we do not price gouge, we’ve never up-sold anyone (rather the opposite), and we do next to no marketing outside resurrecting a 1980s-era video store.
I think there are just a few last points I need to make before this never-ending post comes to a close….
Last day of #MozSprint is almost over! We've had an awesome 2 days building #owlteh & connecting with people all around the world ? We've only just begun, we'll be sharing more resources & updates very soon!
Sponsoring the Learning on/with the Open Web Conference (OWLTEH) at Coventry in October was another highlight, working with the folks at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab is always a pleasure, and the OWLTEH event at Coventry’s Transportation Museum was a total blast. The highlight for me was organizing a panel with Anne-Marie Scott and TOny Hirst to talk about the future of edtech infrastructure and Jupyter Notebooks.
Anne-Marie and Tony were on a serious role, and it was a eye-opening both listening to them for that hour, but then talking with them both before and after OWLTEH. The folks in the UK edtech scene are so awesome, and getting to spend time with so many of them over that two days was a real treat. The Jupyter Notebook phenomemon is not going anywhere, and Tony’s newsletter “Tracking Jupyter” is something I want to spend my coming week off catching up on. Also, I still want to blog my experience at OWLTEH with Anne-Marie and Tony, but it’s been hard cause I feel like I actually have to play with this stuff and I have not had the time just yet…soon. What’s more, it’s hard to write about something that Anne-Marie already has well in hand on her blog.
In November we were all set to our second Workshop of One’s Own in Fredericksburg, but in September we took Justin’s advice and scrapped that model and moved towards regional workshops. One of the struggles of being so locked into support is we don’t do as much of the outreach as we could/should. That changed this fall with our first Reclaim Roadshow at Skidmore College in early November. You can read more about it here, but the long and the short of it is we are running regional events that pair a workshop for admins Domain of One’s Own with a user group/unconference event around a theme. The next one will be at Michigan State University on February 21st and 22nd focused around the idea of Digital Presence, you can read more about it here and here. The Skidmore Roadshow was a total blast, and I am very much looking forward to Michigan, and after a chat with Bryan Mathers we have an organizing aesthetic/metaphor for the Roadshow which I love!
I hope in 2019 we can actually create a short animated piece around a topic, and re-watching Scooby-Doo the last few days at the “Mine Your Own Business” episode from season 1 is ripe for a re-write, especially the Miner 49er character:
DataMiner 49er anyone? I mean this episode can almost re-write itself, they even discover the “new gold” in the haunted mine, oil! Let me count the ways.
Finally, we continue to have some fun with the office space. beyond Reclaim Video. After the Roadshow in Skidmore, Tim and I started doubling down on turning part of the office into a makerspace. Tim’s history with UMW’s early venture into makerspaces is well documented, and we finally bit the bullet and got a pretty bitchin’ 3D printer. And we put it to immediate use given I came back from the Victoria & Albert Video Games exhibition in London with an idea for building a DIY video game based on Line Wobbler, and it just so happens one of the requirements was to 3D print the joystick case.
We also re-connected with George Meadows from UMW (a lot of good re-connecting this year!) who was as jazzed as us about rekindling our shared makerspace history. Although, to be fair, George has not stopped pushing on this technology for teaching and learning since 2012, and the story of how he got 3D printing, Arduino, and a whole variety of cool technologies in the Fredericksburg, Stafford, and Spotsylvania K12 school systems is still to be told—some amazing work he did in that regard.
We also did some more work on the office space. We had some dead space behind Reclaim Video that was essentially transitional storage space that now have two quiet booths for phone calls which was desperately needed by the folks at CoWork, as well as some cleaned up walls and a fresh coat of paint for the new makerspace:
I am just realizing I forgot our Reclaim Today streaming video sessions (we did 13 or so), but I am running out of ink and energy on this one. Reclaim Today is something we need to jumpstart in the Spring, but world enough and time, right? For now that’s going to have to do, although I am sure there is much I left out. Let me end by simply recognizing how lucky I am to have been part of Reclaim for the last 5 and a half years and to work with so many amazing folks. I am really looking forward to 2019, the year when Reclaim Video brings back the glory days of the Saturday Morning Cartoon to edtech :).
Heavy smoke creates an orange glow in the sky over Trinity Hall as the Camp Fire, which started near the community of Pulga in the Feather River canyon carries smoke over campus to create a red haze on Friday, November 9, 2018 in Chico, Calif. (Jason Halley/University Photographer/CSU Chico)
News of the massive devastation caused by the Camp Fire in Northern California may have taken back seat to the federal government shutdown and imaginary walls built upon the ideological quicksand of fear-driven politics, but the devastation Northern California has experienced since August is alarming for all sorts of reasons: environmental, political, professional and personal. All those levels matter, but I freely acknowledge I’m in no position to talk about the environmental or political levels, but on a professional level the California State University system has been early adopters of Domain of One’s Own under Michael Berman’s leadership at Channel Islands. What’s more, the experimental pedagogy of Kim Jaxon at Chico State has been a big reason why Chico adopted Domains over a year ago. They’re one of several schools that have been piloting the possibility of hosting for students and faculty, and it’s always encouraging to see large state universities invest in exploring possibilities when it comes to edtech. So in many ways that if the professional context for us wanting to help the staff, students, and faculty effected by Camp Fire.
CSU Chico Camp Fire Info Page
But on a more personal level, I have family living not only in Chico, but 40 miles northwest in Red Bluff. I have fond affection for that part of Northern California, and I was already deeply alarmed when the Carr Fire ravaged the Redding area in August. For context Redding is 30 miles north of Red Bluff and just 70 miles north of Chico, and that fire tornado during the Carr Fire was just prelude to the utter devastation of the Camp Fire three months later. I found myself calling my brother and his family again in November making sure everyone was safe (luckily they were). So, while I am many thousands of miles away, both the Carr and Camp fires were too close to home. So, when we reached out to the good folks at Chico about how we could help they pointed us to the Chico State’s fundraiser for those impacted by the Camp Fire called Wildcats Rise. Donating was the least we could do, and I was glad to see they’re closing in on their goal. So I figured before retiring for a bit to enjoy the holidays with friends and family it might be worth sharing the link to the Wildcats Rise Fire Recovery Fund for any and all who are willing and able to help.
We are happy to announce our second Reclaim Roadshow at Michigan State University on February 21st and 22nd of next year. As I already noted in my last post, I’m pretty thrilled with the Scooby-Doo inspired aesthetic we dreamed up for our Roadshows, and this is the first time we are putting into action. In fact, you can head over to the site and see how it’s “rolled out.”
I would also recommend reading Lauren’s post on her creation process of the website for the Roadshow, which simply pops! But lest this devolve into a backslapping post about how awesome the art is (there will be plenty more posts about that 🙂 ) it might be helpful to talk a bit about this event. When we were considering the Roadshow originally we actually reached out to Michigan State first given the great work Chris Long, Kristen Mapes and Scott Schopieray have done to promote the idea of Digital Presence for their faculty and graduate students. They really nailed the concept with a short video they produce a couple of years ago that sums up their vision quite well:
Originally MSU was going to be our first Roadshow, but when the opportunity to try it out at Skidmore College availed itself we grabbed it, and I am glad we did because I think the experience will make the MSU Roadshow that much better. The plan for February is that we will run a focused workshop on February 21st that will be an opportunity for folks managing Domains at their campus (or who will soon be) to get an in-depth look at the backend of the system. If you are interested in this workshop you can register here.
On February 22nd (day 2) the good folks at MSU will be organizing a day-long event loosely organized around the topic of Digital Presence. I am excited about the unconference approach, and it is something quite different from what we did at Skidmore College. MSU recently hired Kathleen Fitzpatrick as the Director of Digital Humanities and her pushing on academia reclaiming their web presence for publishing and beyond with her work at the MLA with Commons in a Box offers a unique and exciting opportunity to bring together folks exploring the intersections of Digital Humanities, the Indie Web, and broader ideas of digital identity. I’m getting excited just writing about it. So, if you have no interest in the workshop, but want to come for a day-long conference dealing with a wide range of concerns around the specter of digital presence (you like what I did there?) then sign-up for day 2 and come join us at MSU.
Well, that’s it for now, I need to get this officially announced before the holidays, but I’ll be sure to say more later next week after the Christmas dust settles to start drumming up interest in what promises to be a pretty awesome Roadshow.
You know it has been a busy week (month, fall, year) when it takes 3 days to blog the latest Bryan Mathers magic for Reclaim Hosting, but such is life as a successful businessman. In fact, I’m putting the cart before the horse here a bit by blogging about the art for our next Roadshow (which will be at Michigan State University in late February, but more on that in my next post) before officially announcing the event, but such is life in the fast lane of corporate edtech.
Anyway, following on the fun we had at Skidmore College with our first Roadshow we doubled-down with Michigan State for what will be our second Roadshow, and while we were consolidating some of the details it occurred to me we really need some art for these events. For me it is always aesthetic first, truth and details later. So, two weeks ago Lauren and I reached out to Bryan and he was kind enough to turn around a meeting within a few days and we had our discussion. We laid out what the Roadshow was all about, essentially it’s a way for Reclaim to hit the road and bring together folks in specific regions of the US (and soon beyond?!) to provide targeted training to folks who could not make it to our workshop. What’s more, we built in a second day to bring together current Domain of One’s Own schools in the region to share the work they’re doing. And, as we quickly learned at Skidmore, it also provides a unique opportunity for those schools who are interested in exploring Domains to get an on-the-ground look at how it is being used.
So, we gave Bryan the overview and the discussion got underway and what seems like almost immediately we stumbled on what might be the best Reclaim Hosting marketing campaign to date (I’m little more than a crass marketer after all, but with a heart of gold—unlike all those other thought leaders!). We started talking about road tripping for Reclaim and I could not help but think of the bus…which made me think of the brilliant grant proposal (at the goading of Brian Lamb) we submitted under the aegis of ds106 to the Gates Foundation back in the day to fund a ds106 bus. They couldn’t see the magic, surprisingly, but luckily if you will it, it is no dream…at least on paper. The bus has been re-animated as a Reclaim Roadshow Mystery Van a la Scooby Doo, and it is so damned beautiful I wanna cry!
I’ll talk more about the details around the Ghost of Digital Presence title in my next post, but you get a sense how each Roadshow can be its own episode with various “Monsters of EdTech” (borrowing from the now canonical Audrey Watters after the other day’s “I’m f**king done” announcement—punk rock) as topical villains to animate discussion. In fact, it only makes sense this will all be produced by Reclaim Video. The last discussion I had with Bryan was thinking through what an animated episode of an actual Reclaim Roadshow would look like—maybe Audrey would “ghost write” an episode? So, in order to kickstart some ideas I ordered the first two seasons (1969 and 1970) of Scooby Doo on DVD for holiday watching with the kids, and one of my resolutions for 2019 will be to see if we can create a Saturday Morning Animation series of Edtech. This also touches on another video project I have been wanting to teach, and even wrote an unnecessarily long email to Martin Weller about my ideas around video and teaching, but I should probably save that discussion for another post given this is already running long.
If nothing else, let this post attest to the fact that Bryan Mathers is an endless fount of creative awesome!
Last month Lauren and I travelled to Skidmore College to run our first Reclaim Roadshow. I thought it was a great success, and Lauren has already blogged her reflections on the two-day workshop/user-group. I agree with her entirely that it was invigorating to get on the road and talk at length with both current and prospective Domainers about the limits and possibilities of this platform. I’ll try and follow-up on Lauren’s post about the workshop after I finally blog about our post-workshop conversation with Katie Martell (which Lauren also already blogged!), so essentially go read Lauren’s blog for any relevant news and let me write about getting my ass kicked on Mt. Marcy 🙂
But it was gorgeous, but let me backtrack here. When Ben Harwood, Lauren and I were planning the Reclaim Roadshow I was interested in returning to a childhood haunt, namely Lake George. As a teenager I spent a number of very memorable summers inidyllic Bolton Landing thanks to my good friend and his father’s enormous hospitality. Lake George is amazing and given Skidmore College is just twenty miles south I was hoping to spend a day hiking around the lake, particularly given late Fall is a part of the year that I had never seen that area. So, as a bonus to the Roadshow was the possibility of a hike, which given my attempts to survive in Trentino the last few years seemed very inline with the new and improved bionic bava.
So, after the workshop Ben suggested we try the highest peak in New York State, namely Mt. Marcy, which is actually two hours north of Saratoga Springs near Lake Placid—home of the 1980 Winter Olympics! When I looked at the altitude of 5,343 feet (1,629 m) I was like “Not a problem.” Hiking altitudes of 2000 to 2500 meters has become a fairly regular occurrence these days, and I was confident that the hike would not be an issue. So, Ben (who is old gold ds106 and has been in the edtech game for a long time) recommended it I was like absolutely, let’s do it. But when he soon after suggested we leave at 4 in the morning I was kinda dismissive. “Why? Do we really need to leave that early for a modest day hike?” Turns out that was my pride fucking with me. The hike to Mt. Marcy from our point of departure (the Adirondack Loj) was over a 7 mile hike one way. “OK, so it is a bit longer distance than the hikes I usually do—but still, 4 AM?” That was my pride fucking with me again. We did get up at 4 AM, and we arrived at the Loj (the unfortunate spelling was a victim of Melvil Dewey, founder of the Lake Placid Club and ardent advocate of spelling reform) at 6 AM and I appreciated the early start cause that would mean we could finish the hike early and spend the afternoon checking out the Olympic Village in Lake Placid. What did I say about pride again?
So we started our hike in the dark, and did I mention it was snowing? It had started snowing the evening before, and while in Saratoga Springs it was turning to rain, two hours north it was solid snow. We were chasing the snow plows up to Lake Placid, and by the time we got to Mt. Marcy there was at least 6-8 inches on the ground with the heavy stuff just getting underway.
It made for a beautiful and peaceful hike. I was feeling good at the start. Ben and I had a hearty egg sandwich at a nearby Stewart’s, not to mention we came prepared with food, snacks, and refreshments of all kinds. The first hour or so was solid, I was moving at a decent clip, and while the path was a bit more rough than I’m used to I was feeling good. But then we started to climb, and the path was not what I am used to….
Literally there was no discernible path, and the rocks, streams, and snow were starting to wreak havoc on my flow. Ben, however, was unphased—and I was like hmmm. And then, the others came, and that’s when I knew I was not as good a hiker as Italy has led me to believe. Let me explain something here quickly, the Italian alps have spoiled me. The paths are wide, well-marked and meticulously manicured. What’s more, even the most banal surroundings in the Alps are postcard quality, and often times hikes lead to world class restaurants. That was not the case here, the views were all of trees and streams (although quite pristine and gorgeous woods to be fair) and the trails more akin to an obstacle course; I found myself jumping over streams onto rocks and more than once found my boot in 8 inches of cold mud. I was getting exhausted by the hike in the second hour, and then, as I already mentioned, the others came. People in their 50s and 60s dressed in lycra jumpsuits and booties flew by me like weightless ghosts out for a stroll. It was as if I was standing still. My pride got an overdue reality check; I was in for a serious hike. While the altitude was nothing, the trail and the distance was everything, and each step was earned. While the amazing vistas in Trentino are doled out like universal basic income payments, in typical American fashion you work really hard for very little in the way of a payoff. A couple of times on the way up the trees broke a little to show off other peaks, but not often enough to be noteworthy.
That said, maybe this hike seems so special to me because I did have to work so hard for what by other standards seems so little. The landscape seemed very 17th or 18th century America to me, if that makes any sense. I felt a sense of an expansive, wild, and beautiful setting that seemed to come from before our time, it was almost other worldly—and very different from the sense of the conquered paths of the Italian Alps. But maybe all that was my exhaustion (rather than my pride) fucking with me by that point. Seven hours later, and almost 7 miles of ascending and we finally arrived at 1 PM to an area we learned was called Mini Mt Marcy. We were getting up to where the tree line was ending, and the wind and snow were picking up. The last 1000 feet were going to be well-earned. In fact, with 3 or 4 hours of daylight left it was quickly becoming clear we were not going to make it to the summit. We were close, but there would be no cigar. And by this time my pride was all but gone, and I was now thinking survival given it was starting to get colder.
So Ben and I went on a bit further and then decided to turn back and make it down the mountain before nightfall. I appreciate that Ben held back a bit for me because it was apparent he could have gone much further much faster, but it seemed like he was in his happy place regardless, so I don’t think he minded too much.
On the other hand I was worried about the way down given that is often when you’re tired that you get careless and shit goes wrong. But the way down was pretty smooth, much easier than the climb up, and we got back right around 5 when the day was spent. On the way down we were passed by a few folks who had ascended the summit, and Ben asked what time they started, the answer was crazy….3 AM! I think we could have made it to the top if we started the hike at 3 AM, but not sure I would do that knowing as much. The gentleman also noted he tried summiting last weekend but could not given the ice, so he returned to finish what he started and I thought that was pretty cool. He did mention he could have used snow shoes given he was making the trail in waist high snow, which is when I was thrilled we didn’t try and go any higher given my dungarees had already become a patchwork of dirt and fairly large ice balls that added at least 5 pounds to my load.
But we made it back safe and sound, and the two bowls of chicken soup I ate for dinner never tasted so good. In fact, hiking almost 15 miles in a day and being pushed quite hard for hours at a time made this probably the most memorable hike to date. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things in Italy, but being pushed like this is a different thing all together—and you start to really go inside yourself mentally which is something I enjoy a lot. It was a flashback to my brief time as a long distance runner back in the early 90s. It’s kinda rewarding to think I’m scratching my way back into something resembling physical shape, and also sobering to realize there is so much more work to do. But more than anything, it was a very cool adventure into the Adirondack wilderness, and while I appreciate the stunning beauty of Italy, this trip rekindled a similar joy I experienced as a wayward teenager hiking the Adirondacks around Lake George during those long high school summer vacations. I guess the ultimate trip in all this is time, and how it’s both circular when it comes to memory and experience and linear when it comes to my aging ass.
Super Admin -image found at https://ben.lobaugh.net
While I’m on the sysadmin blogging tip, wanted to record another issue that came my way this week so I can remember how to solve it. WordPress Multisite (WPMS) is probably the application I am most comfortable with supporting (which is probably not saying much) because I have a pretty good sense of the way in which it abstracts the global database tables from the individual blog site tables. So, when I got a ticket this week letting about an issue with super admin access to the Network features, I was fairly certain I could solve it, especially since I asked for help with a similar issue with one of my own blogs earlier this year when moving it from a WPMS environment to a one-off WordPress blog.
So, the issue here was an super admin could no longer access the Network admin dashboard after their LDAP details changed. To update the LDAP plugin they needed super admin access, but when I checked the user table there was no super admin.* Anyway, there are a few ways to give a user super admin access as Andy Feliciotti blogged brilliantly already. Given I had no users with super admin access, I was going to have to take the phpMyAdmin route which entails editing the “admins” field in the “wp_sitemeta” table. I’ll quote Feliciotti below given he was quite clear:
You’ll see some serialized data in the value of the field such as “a:1:{i:1;s:5:”admin”;}”. When you’re dealing with serialized data it can get a bit odd, but adding an admin with the user name “Andy” would be done as follows.
"a:2:{i:1;s:5:"admin";i:2;s:4:"Andy";}"
So as you can see the first number a:2 matches how many entries you have so for 3 admins you’d put 3. I simple just copied and pasted the first bit “i:1;s:5:”admin”” and added a semicolon to indicate another entry. Then increased the i by one and s matches how many characters are in the username, in my case 4. If you enter any of the variables wrong you’ll know by checking to see if your new user is an admin.
I did this and was able to restore super admin access to the user, and they could do what they needed to do, which is always nice. As for why this happened, well that might be fodder for another post when I figure it out.
*The cause of the underlying issue is one I am still looking into, not sure if the LDAP details changing had anything to do with it, but I am thinking no.
We have a server that runs a kind of multisite Discourse environment that I discussed a number of years ago in this post. It is an Ubuntu server with Docker installed, and each of the Discourse instances on that server are spun up in Docker containers. It’s a very small, experimental part of what we do. In fact, we discontinued offering Discourse and Ghost in this kind of environment a while back, and are far more interested in options like Cloudron, which makes hosting Ghost a breeze. That said, we have a couple of Discourse instances we still host and today the biggest one went down, which is always a bit of a scare for me given it is a unique environment. So, this post is simply going to retrace my steps in terminal to fix this because I always forget given it is not something I do often enough.
When I learned the server was down I figured I would try stopping and restarting the Container to see if that works. To do that I needed to go to var/discourse:
cd /var/discourse
From there, I tried to stop the container —to find the container name I looked in the /var/discourse/containers/ directory which has all the YAML files for each install, and the container names are everything before the .yml extension.
./launcher stop containername
That will stop the container and the following will restart it:
./launcher start containername
But when I went to stop the container I got the a storage full error, and when I ran a
df -h
on the server it was confirmed, the disk was full. I then proceeded to run the trusty NCDU command to get a sense of what was taking up all the space, and I have a suspicion it might be related to this overlay2 storage space issue others have complained about with Docker, but I took the easy route and deleted 10 GBs of old backups for the site and it was immediately back up and running. In the end a restart was not necessary, and I was able to solve a fairly random issue fairly quickly.
I was fielding a ticket today for someone who was having a couple of issues with Drupal 8 after install, namely they were getting a Trusted Host Settings errorHere is the full error that shows up in the admin area:
*Errors found*
Trusted Host Settings – Not enabled
The trusted_host_patterns setting is not configured in settings.php. This
can lead to security vulnerabilities. It is highly recommended that you
configure this. See Protecting against HTTP HOST Header attacks for more
information.
Being the awesome web hosting support technician that I am, I Googled it for a solution. And after watching the following video from the DrupalTutor I learned a couple of things:
This happens in Drupal 8 on install
This issue has been happening as far back as 2016
The fix is to edit the settings.php file in sites/default after changing permissions and figuring out a pretty hacky solution
The fact that this was happening to folks as soon as they installed the application is insane to me. What could be a worse user experience? Add to that the caching error below, and you have a perfect storm of terrible:
*PHP *
OPcode caching – Not enabled
PHP OPcode caching can improve your site’s performance considerably. It is highly recommended to have OPcache installed on your server.
Fact is PHP OPcode caching is enabled on this server, so you have to once again search the error message and use the fix given in this forum post to get rid of the error. I did not even check to see if they have a visual text editor after resolving these issues because I just didn’t have strength. Really Drupal?
With the move of Reclaim Hosting’s infrastructure to DigitalOcean, we’ve had to retire fewer and fewer shared hosting servers. For us there is a natural cycle of students and faculty that sign-up for a class or project and a fair number no longer need the space after the class or project is done, which means there content is ultimately removed and we can keep using those servers without overcrowding. It’s a lot more sustainable than our previous setup with ReliableSite, and it means we have to add fewer shared hosting servers than previously. That said, the need still arises and given we’ve had to retire a bunch of servers like ramones, minutemen, huskerdu, unwound, etc. it’s nice to be able to reclaim the classics and bring them back to life—it’s like the inevitable “re-united and it feels so good” tour for servers. We actually started this in June with our last shared hosting server Fugazi and even followed up in August with a revival of our very first server Clash (just now realizing I never blogged that one!) so when Tim was inquiring about our next server name I just happened to be listening to Blondie‘s 1978 masterpiece Parallel Lines in Reclaim Video.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqDkgxUF3Zf/
To get even further in the weeds, neither Fugazi nor Blondie were previously shared hosting servers, rather they were the hostnames of the dedicated servers we were using on ReliableSite to manage several virtualized instances of Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) for schools using Solus. We quickly stopped naming DoOO servers after bands given how hard it was becoming to remember what band maps to what school, and simply named the server after the school. So the new shared hosting server names are actually ones that never really saw the light of day because they were effectively wrappers for a group of virtual private servers for various schools. There are a few others of this variety that we need to revive as well, namely Sonic Youth, the Replacements, and GenX. There ‘s strange consistency and persistence to it all, at least in my mind. And now that there is even a pattern emerging, Fugazi (DoOO VPS server) then Clash (our first shared hosting server) then Blondie (another DoOO VPS server) the next server name has to be a throwback to the OG shared hosting servers, and I have a good idea which one. What’s in a name? Everything.
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I was fielding a ticket today for someone who was having a couple of issues with Drupal 8 after install, namely they were getting a Trusted Host Settings errorHere is the full error that shows up in the admin area:
