The Setup I came into the office today and was bombarded with users not being able to access our TFS server. Now, before I get too far into this story, you have to understand: Technically I’m only responsible for client-facing infrastructure. However, over the years I’ve started wearing more of a devops hat because, apparently, I’m quite good at it. That means TFS is now largely my problem. Funny how that works, eh?
Had an interesting issue today. One of the production systems suddenly went dark, and we found out about it from the client. This is never a good way to start a Thursday. It turns out that the client was having DNS issues and the domain was no longer valid. Relatively simple fix, crisis averted…
After configuring W3 Total Cache and playing around with google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, I was able to increase The End of the Tunnel’s score from 49 to 96! This is impressive to me because this site currently runs on the basic DreamHost shared environment plan. No dedicated servers, no fancy configurations, just good cache management. Fantastic!
I was working on the site today and ran into an issue: Our caching DNS server (Windows 2008) was holding on to the old webserver’s IP. This wasn’t a problem for me locally as I used the old hosts file trick to point to the new server. However, this meant I couldn’t show other folks the site until either the cache was completely flushed or the record expired.
A little googling later, and I found this little command from ServerFault.