Cafuego

I spent far too much time this past week trying to find out why a Drupal was not  assigning authenticated user permissions to users who clicked on the validation link they were emailed. Instead, it would simply remove the temporary unverified user permission.

It's supposed to do the latter, but then also follow it up with the former. It turns out the problem was a Drupal bug that was triggered by my MySQL setup.

In order to rule out a crap power infrastructure as the cause for some naughty server behaviour on a client site, it was suggested I should stick a UPS on said server, to make sure that at least the input power would be clean.

In a confusion of Andys I found a recommendation for the APC BackUPS CS 500, so that is what I got and installed.

A while ago Arjen Lentz blogged about transient MySQL errors that can occur when using a transactional storage engine, like say InnoDB.

Since I'm a fan of the reliability and automated recovery that InnoDB provides, I use it for all the Drupals that I host.  However, on a very busy site, this may lead to deadlocks. These in turn lead to users seeing errors, which is something I'd like to avoid. Especially if the error could be prevented.

As is our wont, from time to time we have a bit of a chocolate pig-out, with varying brands and types of chocolate.

The latest one was extremely unsatisfying. The hazelnut Cadbury just didn't feel or taste right, so we had a look at the ingredients list on the new packaging and found that the composition had been altered.

Old ingredients list

When I flashed the Mini 2140 yesterday I used a Windows laptop to create a bootable flash drive with the BIOS utility and update on it.

I didn't really need to use a non-free operating system, as HP provide a tiny bootable ISO image with FreeDOS, but using that means wasting a CD-R. It's not that those are expensive, but they do end up in landfill.

Instead, I'd like to be able to simply use a USB key. I found some help on the FreeDOS wiki and I thought I'd document the steps I followed on Ubuntu.