Tag Archives: Blog

Response and feedback about the Veeam hardened repository presentation

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Veeam hardened repository presentation

It is great to get so much response and feedback about the Veeam hardened repository presentation. So, first of all, I thank all those reaching out to me in regards to the TechNine virtual user group session I gave on this subject.

Response and feedback about the Veeam hardened repository presentation
Immutability and backup chains – this was a well received presentation!

Most of you did so via the contact e-mail on my blog and not via a comment on the original blog post here. Many of you asked for a recording. Let’s address that first.

Where is the recording?

There is no recording. The TechNine user group tries to bring people together for the events and promote interactive discussions afterward. Hence, no recording is available. They do this to stimulate participation.

I did not make this presentation exclusively for TechNine, but they did get the world premiere. The good news is that I will be giving this session again and I will even be doing a webcast with my fellow Microsoft MVP and Veeam Vanguard Carsten Rachfahl about this. In the webcast, we will discuss the hardened repository at length and it will be published online.

So, nothing to worry about, you will get other opportunities to attend and you will have a recoding of the content reasonably soon.

Reaching out to me

Lately, I have noticed that my readers and social media followers seem to have gotten increasingly shy and do not ask their questions publicly via the blog comments section or social media.

That poses a challenge to me. While I would like to help you all individually, that approach just doesn’t scale. I have a job, family, life, and interest to pursue. I just cannot allocate the time to do so.

Veeam hardened repository presentation
I do explain this on my contact page!

Please ask you questions in the comments section of the relevant blog post and I will normally get to it. The benefit is that that public answer can help others as well with limited effort from myself. If the answer to a super interesting question is lengthy, I can decide to turn it into a blog post. That also helps all people out there. Thank you for being respectful of my time and sharing with the community yourself!

Unscheduled Maintenance for WorkingHardInIT Blog

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If you tried to visit my blog on December the 15th you might have found it to be unreachable or that it timed out. My blog is attracting quite a bit or traffic and that was beginning to show for while now, mainly in CPU cycles and memory consumption. To be honest, the sizing was “tight” for budget reasons.

Well,  the site finally caved in under the load that became too much for the virtual machine in Azure it’s running on. I did investigate any other possible cause, but in the end it just needed more CPU and memory. So that’s what was behind the spotty behavior and suboptimal responsiveness yesterday which we kindly refer to as unscheduled maintenance.

Anyway, this meant I had to move the VM to a bigger size and pay more. I hope this will do for a while and I’ll see how much the bill will be to see if the costs are sustainable. The blogging is “just” a community effort in the end.

Video Spam in my WordPress blog comments?

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Last night I noticed that a lot of my comments seemed to have random Vimeo video’s embedded into the comments. Sometimes one, some times many. At first you think somebody would use embedding Vimeo embedding code/tags to do so but it was very wide spread over many comments over the years.

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So was I hacked? Nope. I did find no evidence of that and I also did not find any hidden code/tags. It turns out to be a Jetpack 3.9.5 bug and the fix was to either disable or get a new version of Jetpack that would fix the issue: Jetpack 3.9.5 and 3.9.6: Maintenance Releases

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As 3.9.6 was available today I upgraded to that version to see if that would also fix this annoying issue.

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After updating to Jetpack 3.9.6 the issue has indeed gone. Good news!

WorkingHardInIT Blog Maintenance Window & Tools Used

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As you might have noticed my blog was down last night for about 1 hour and 45 minutes between 22:20 and 00:10. A bit longer than I wanted but I needed more time do deal with the upgrade of MySQL as part of the routine maintenance I do on my WordPress blog server.

In the environments under my care I take care to take the time to do routine maintenance to avoid falling behind to much in firmware, drivers, patches, etc. This takes some effort but as it helps prevent bigger issues in the long run it’s worth while to do so. I take the same approach with my blog as much as possible. Most of this maintenance goes by without you ever noticing. The windows updates reboots being the exception. WordPress upgrades, plugin upgrades, PHP upgrades, etc. … all go swiftly usually which means I’m pretty well covered there, frequently.

Upgrading MySQL however is always a bit of a time consuming effort and depending on what version you’re upgrading from and to witch one it can actually mean multiple sequential upgrades (5.1 to 5.5.44 to 5.6.25).image

I practiced this upgrade on a copy of the VM in azure to make sure I could handle whatever came up and still I had to deal with some challenges I did not encounter in the test environment. That show that I’m not a full time hard core MySQL guru I guess.

Anyway after getting to MySQL 5.6.25 from 5.5.44 and fixing some issues with TIMESTAMP with implicit DEFAULT value is deprecated (easy fix) and dealing with the error in MySQL Workbench:

An unhandled exception occurred (Error executing ‘SELECT t.PROCESSLIST_ID,
IF (NAME = ‘thread/sql/event_scheduler’,’event_scheduler’,t.PROCESSLIST_USER) PROCESSLIST_USER,t.PROCESSLIST_HOST,t.PROCESSLIST_DB,t.PROCESSLIST_COMMAND,
t.PROCESSLIST_TIME,t.PROCESSLIST_STATE,t.THREAD_ID,t.TYPE,t.NAME,t.PARENT_THREAD_ID,
t.INSTRUMENTED,t.PROCESSLIST_INFO,a.ATTR_VALUE FROM performance_schema.threads t 
LEFT OUTER JOIN performance_schema.session_connect_attrs a ON t.processlist_id = a.processlist_id AND (
a.attr_name IS NULL OR a.attr_name = ‘program_name’) WHERE t.TYPE <> ‘BACKGROUND”
Native table ‘performance_schema’.’threads’ has the wrong structure.
SQL Error: 1682). Please refer to the log files for details.

which I fixed by running run mysqld –performance_schema I’m rocking everything up to date once more.

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Always have good backups, make exports of your database schema, data and structures in MySQL and have multiple ways out when things go south. In Azure I’m relying on Backup Vault where I protect my virtual machine with schedules backup jobs. I also backup my WordPress with the data via a plug in and export the database via MySQL Workbench.

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Those dumps are copied out of the VM to where ever I want (Azure, One Drive, home PC, a VM running in AWS …) to make sure I have multiple options to recover.

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VEEAM FastSCP for Microsoft Azure comes in very handy for this by the way. You might want to check it out if you’re in need of an automated and secure way to get data out of a VM running in Microsoft Azure!