Well the past 8 weeks of my life have had a lot of ups and downs I must say but it feels like its all finally paid off. I got to launch a new site on Friday that I'm really happy with. I got to work with some great team members and we all pulled together and created an awesome site, or at least I think so! Club SOAPnet launched on friday without a hitch. There are a couple of small things missing and should be a nice easy week of clean up. I spent a lot of time before beginning development working on the data model and looking through PEAR to see what packages will help me out. Some of the challenges were integrating with the Disney Global Registration system but that worked out in the end using curl to keep a seemless login process. It was nice not having to worry about storing sensitive data for once thanks Disney for taking that off my shoulders. I coded the whole site in about 5 weeks time using PEAR and my own custom, makeshift framework. My PHP framework isn't quite there but I'm very happy with the progress I've made on it with this project and it gave me a lot of insight into some more ideas I want to build into the framework. Hopefully if i get all that information gathered together outside my head I will share it with you all. Until then enjoy the site and let me know what you think!

So I was using curl to plug into an external API for a project, and was using CURL to pass some variables too and from. I got CURL moduel setup and running in php easily enough but was still having issues hitting an SSL. So I uploaded it to my webserver and it worked, so something in the windows SSL .dll file I had was a little off. I did some digging in the manual and found this:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);

that fixed it right up. For some reason it couldn't verify the CA host on my windows testing server. For testing locally it was a quick fix and made things happy so yeah!

(05:37:10) thebastedo: this project blows my nuts
(05:37:29) friend: hey
(05:37:33) thebastedo: huh?
(05:37:33) friend: i thought only i got to do that
(05:37:37) friend: lol
(05:37:40) thebastedo: nope
(05:37:43) thebastedo: work is above you
(05:37:47) thebastedo: cuz they pay my rent
(05:37:48) friend: loll
(05:37:52) thebastedo: they get what they want
(05:37:54) friend: who pays yer souP!!!
(05:37:55) friend: =P
(05:38:04) thebastedo: well you pay my rent too i'll let you be the only one
(05:38:10) friend: i should atleast get top priority below work
(05:38:19) thebastedo: well you get it whenever you want
(05:38:24) thebastedo: as long as i'm not currently engaged
(05:38:39) thebastedo: but my nuts are exclusive to you
(05:39:55) friend: hahaha
(05:39:56) friend: ok

sorry I just wanted to help save some of my funny comments with my friends from when I'm up way to late working.

So about a month ago we put in a new hosting infrastructure and me as the sole admin needed an easy way to monitor and keep an eye on all of my servers and the services and resources of each server.



So after some digging around I found that an application I use to use was now a new application Nagios. Now this application is great, took me about 2 days to set everything up as it is now, but once I found everything i needed it was great. Nagios uses SNMP Protocol to monitor almost anything on your server. It has a very OO configuration allowing you to reach some pretty complex setups. Mine didn't get too complex so i can't speak to all of that but it was pretty easy to setup once I got the hang of it. After I found these two Nagios Plugin pages I knew I was truely in heaven. NagiosExchange and Manubulon Nagios Plugins.



Nagios does a lot for me. It watches my partitions and lets me know if one gets close to full and notifies me before it gets full, watches RAM / Swap usage, checks to see that Apache, MySQL and SSHD are up and running, and even checks the status of my mysql replication to my backup server.

Though nagios was great, it didn't completely satisfy all my needs. Though it watched to make sure everything was up and running I couldn't see trends in usage and such. So I went out and installed MRTG on my monitor and began setting up MRTG stuff to log usage of network connections, cpu, ram, and hd usage on all my machines. This helps me to better see when I may need to upgrade things hopefully before even Nagios knows.
MRTG Page

All in all the key to a happy administrator is preparedness. Trying to keep this in more of a proactive environment than a responsive one. If anyone has any more questions about either of these apps let me know I'd be happy to answer some questions!

one of my coworkers sent me this link today, haven't had a ton of time to play with it but looks pretty sweet.

WWW SQL Designer

Which is a nice interface to GModeler that Grant Skinner made which runs in flash. Gmodeler seems a little more geared to software architecture than db modeling. Both fun and handy little tools

GModeler