The other day, my hosting provider initiated a forced reboot of the server I use to run this website. Unfortunately, this resulted in some unanticipated down time. Now I should note, I’m a web application developer, not a system administrator. I really run this server has a hobby an as an opportunity to learn. But in my professional career, I delegate the responsibilities of setting up these things to a team of talented system administrators. With the site down, I was seeing entries like this in my logs:

I keep digging up this same information from some obscure sources, so I thought I would post it here. Now if you have not set up XDebug with a project locally, I highly recommend that, but still, nothing beats a good stack trace. In Drupal 7, I would drop this into settings.php to show errors, regardless of the site settings:

I am in the middle of preparing to launch a site on my company's hosting platform. This site in particular consumes a service, provided by a server running on NodeJS. We typically secure dev sites behind some basic authentication by the web server, which is mainly done to prevent dev sites from being indexed by search crawlers. So to get past this basic authentication, I set the dev URL to follow the username:password@domain convention. I have not used this often, only for simple cases over the years.

Pictured above: I bought this children's book about planets for my son in the book store bargain bin. The page about the earth, is pictured as a mirrored image. An obvious mistake from the book's publisher.

Discussing complex scientific concepts in a medium limited to 240 character messages is probably the worst idea anyone has come up with. Yet here I am, allowing myself to get dragged into drawn out discussions with armchair “skeptics” who don’t really deserve that label. A few weeks ago, Scott Adams, famous as being the creator of the Dilbert comic strip (to his credit, I love these comics), issued a “Climate Challenge” on twitter. Here is his tweet:

I just had to make a post about this strange issue. A client sent me a database for a Drupal 7 site so I could resolve an issue for them. I clone the site, set up a virtual machine, import the DB. But trying to interact with the site resolved in some unusual errors:

After attempting any drush command: