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Incrementally Copying (Rsyncing) Files From A Kubernetes Pod

Incrementally Copying (Rsyncing) Files From A Kubernetes Pod

The most obvious choice for moving files in and out of containers is kubectl cp but it just does a straight copy of all the bytes. If you want to backup just a few changed bytes out of several...

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Excel and data management - when will they learn?

Excel and data management - when will they learn?

We’ve written once or twice before about the perils of using Excel for the management of large-scale critical data… but it seems that big organisations and government agencies (who should know...

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Why You Should Always Give Lazily Loaded Images A Width & Height

Why You Should Always Give Lazily Loaded Images A Width & Height

When images are set to load lazily they will only be downloaded when they come into view but what counts as "in view"? It seems Google Chrome only takes the vertical scroll position into account...

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Persisting Data Between Steps In BitBucket Pipeline Builds

Persisting Data Between Steps In BitBucket Pipeline Builds

When using a build pipeline it is common to create some kind of value, like a path, container ID, auth token etc in one step which is then needed in a subsequent step but the whole point of steps...

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Using FallbackResource with Apache Header Expressions Causes Weirdness

Using FallbackResource with Apache Header Expressions Causes Weirdness

Recently we needed to set one of our Apache servers to output a HTTP header for a specific URL, a simple task right? Well it turns out it can be a right pain... The server is pretty standard,...

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Hunting For Zombie Pods

Hunting For Zombie Pods

At almost exactly 0300 (UTC) on the morning of 22/05 our monitoring systems started sending alerts for a handful of websites. They had begun to respond slower. This was very strange, the sites...

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Satis Queue Worker

Satis Queue Worker

As part of a recent server migration we had to move a Satis instance. The server it was being moved from was a baremetal server, the server it was going to was a Kubernetes cluster, quite...

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On server migrations…

On server migrations…

Server migration:  there’s a term bound to strike fear into the heart. Horror stories of downtime and lost data abound. This post looks at the good and bad of our migration from dedicated to Cloud...

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Misleading Validation Messages When Creating BitBucket Pipeline Variables

Misleading Validation Messages When Creating BitBucket Pipeline Variables

Just in case anyone else finds themselves wrestling with this:  I was recently attempting to create BitBucket Pipeline variables via BitBuckets API using curl: curl -X POST --data...

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Protecting Against Textfile Collector Script Failure

Protecting Against Textfile Collector Script Failure

Monitoring bespoke metrics with Prometheus textfile collector scripts can fail in such a way that all your monitors look fine but actually there is a problem. Here's how to prevent that. When...

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