Blog

Invalidating all Admin Passwords in Magento

Published: November 19, 2018

If you’re dealing with a Magento site that has experienced a breach, it’s a good idea to reset all admin user passwords.

The easiest way to do this is to run a direct SQL query to update the password column in the admin_user table to gibberish.

UPDATE admin_user SET password = '--------';

No string will hash to this value, so essentially all the accounts will be locked at this point.

Moving a process running under strace to a screen session

Published: November 10, 2018

Today I was in a scenario where I started running a process under strace with the hopes of capturing diagnostic information about an error. However, instead of hitting the error, the process began to run succesfully.

It would likely take at least an hour to complete, and I was nervous that I’d lose my SSH connection, causing the process to wind up failing. I was also nervous that if I stopped the process to restart in a screen session, it wouldn’t be safe to re-run as it would have partially imported some data at that point.

Here, I’ll walk through my findings about moving a process running under strace to a screen session.

cURL error 77 with PHP-FPM after yum update

Published: November 5, 2018

Recently a client reported that checkout was broken on their ecommerce website.

After some quick investigation, I found that the application code responsible for speaking with the payment gateway was logging the following error:

CURL Connection error:  (77)

Here, I’ll outline my approach to solving this problem.

Backing up Sublime Text Configuration Files without Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Published: October 29, 2018

As a developer, it’s common practice to backup your system settings to a remote git repository. Conventionally, these repositories are given the name “dotfiles”.

I’ve long had such a repository containing a ~/.zshrc file. Recently, however, I decided to backup settings for a few additional tools, including Sublime Text.

CSV Color Highlighting in Sublime Text with rainbow_csv

Published: October 23, 2018

If you’re a developer, I’d be willing to wage a bet on the following…

• From time-to-time you work with data in CSV files
• You don’t particularly enjoy working with Microsoft Excel

At least for my self, I know these two statements are true.

Magento Gift Card Statuses

Published: October 18, 2018

Recently, I fielded a request to generate a detailed gift card usage report.

If you navigate to Marketing > Gift Card Accounts in the admin panel of a Magento 2 site you’ll the following grid…

While this is helpful, unfortunately it was lacking some information the client desired such as the date the gift card was used.

In the process of looking at this I became interested in the “Status” column that displayed in the grid. It lists four options…

• Available
• Used
• Redeemed
• Expired

The meaning of these statuses is not exactly clear, nor is it documented anywhere, as far as I can tell. As such, I decided to do a little investigation. Here, I’ll detail my findings…