CobraCARE.net CMS Conversion
One of machineLOGIC's clients runs the cobraCARE.net website. They'd been hosting it with a 3rd party on their proprietary web application but were looking for other options. I proposed moving the site to a WordPress CMS back-end with some custom pages to handle the data gathering requirements. I also coordinated the migration to the new web host and the associated DNS changes.
The WordPress portion was pretty straightforward. I started with a theme that had the the basic look & feel and then customized it a bit to remove the "blog" stuff and use the existing logo. A few plugins were incorporated to handle the member management, secure access and related functionality. Then I made a couple sets of custom Page templates for the data collection forms. They use PHP and JavaScript for validation (pre and post Post) and it all seems to work quite well.
HP DL320 Repair
This was a project that extended much longer than necessary... One of the machineLOGIC clients had a failed drive in one of their backup servers. Usually not a big deal since the drives are in a RAID array. However, as soon as I'd replace the drive, another drive would get marked as failed -- not the original drive (which would still be marked as failed as well).
Nervous about losing everything, I used Clonezilla to make an image of the remaining drive in the boot mirror. That gave us some leeway to experiment.
Called HP support, they suggested flashing everything in the server: mainboard, raid controller, drives and anything in between that could be flashed. Unfortunately, that didn't change anything so ordered another drive with the theory that the first replacement was bad.
Nope, that wasn't it. Ordered another drive. Still wasn't the issue.
Dan, of machineLOGIC, finally called in a regional expert HP tech. Took him a while, but he found that the issue was related to how the server had initially been assembled -- the drive ports didn't match up to the same number controller ports... In other words, I had yet to have actually touched the right drive!
Once that was settled it was just a matter of minutes to get the right drive swapped and the clonezilla image restored back to the server.
Non-Profit Firewall changes
One of the things I noticed when doing the local non-profit's overview was an apparent lack of a firewall. However, upon looking closer I found that it was part of their Cbeyond voice/data plan -- and it had issues.
I spent some time going through the firewall rules, exceptions and port forwarding and then locked it all up nice and tight. It would appear that in the past folks had configured things to allow easier remote access. They had also been hosting servers from within the office... Those servers were all gone but the firewall rules lived on. Things just weren't as secure as they should be.
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