Blog
Inspecting Outbound Traffic to New Relic with tcpdump
Published: May 8, 2018
tcpdump is a tool I reach for occasionally, but not on a daily basis by any means. As such, I always forget how to use it when I need it.
Most recently I was troubleshooting an issue where I couldn’t see any data in New Relic for a website I help support at Something Digital. The newrelic-daemon showed as running in the process list and no errors were reported in the logs, so one question I had was, is the server actually sending the data outbound to New Relic?
tcpdump is just the right tool to answer that question, so I decided to pull it out. Here I’ll document how I answered the question as a reference for the next time I (or you 
) need to pull out tcpdump.
Password Protect Files and Folders from the Command Line with zip
Published: May 4, 2018
There are quite a few blog posts and StackOverflow threads covering this, but somehow, I had difficulty finding the answer I was looking for on Google. As such, I’m publishing this for my (and now your ) reference…
Linux Screen Cheatsheet
Published: April 25, 2018
There are a few of these, but none have all the answers that I want (e.g. how to scroll back up the terminal while attached to a screen session) or are in a format I like. So, I’ve prepared my own.
This is a cheatsheet of how to do the things I typically need to do with Linux (unix)’s screen command…
Exporting Your Browser Cookies on a Mac (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
Published: April 12, 2018
Recently, for some research I’ve been doing I’ve had the desire to get an export of all my browser cookies. I wound up taking a look at how to do this the three browsers I use, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. In this post I’ll document my findings.
Magento + MySQL Query Cache: A Case Study
Published: April 1, 2018
The MySQL query cache is one of the most controversial MySQL features. While Percona concluded a blog post titled “The MySQL query cache: Worst enemy or best friend?” by stating that “the MySQL query cache is a good fit” for Magento, one of the world’s leading ecommerce platforms, the MySQL team announced that the query cache will be removed from MySQL 8.0.
On the Magento 1.14 Enterprise Edition site of a client I work with at Something Digital the query cache was inadvertently disabled, and later re-enabled once the issue was caught. This gave us great visibility into the impact the query cache was having on this application. Here I’ll share our findings…
Customers Seeing Wrong Order Confirmation Page / Customer Account In Magento
Published: March 18, 2018
Recently, I was looped in to the following issue reported by a client we recently onboarded at Something Digital…
Customers are placing orders and seeing the wrong order confirmation page. Also, customers are logging in and seeing the wrong customer account.
Yes. It’s as scary as it sounds.
This was a tricky one, but in the end I got to the bottom of it. Here, I’ll document the saga and solution.