LightSpeedTaco

Hello everyone, A lot has happened since my last post but that can be considered a good thing as many improvements have been implemented as a result of my focus on the user experience. For starters we reinstalled the operating systems on all three servers and went from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 18.04 and we have also moved all the applications except the dashboard which is just served through plain old Apache rather than from a Docker container. All other services are running in their own containers in Docker instances on all three servers. This enables us to efficiently deploy and manage individual services without having to worry about conflicts from requirements and dependencies between the various types of code. Using a project called Ouroboros (a python based successor to watchtower as described in the project’s Github description) which monitors containers for updates to their images and autonomously redeploys the container(s) in question with the newest image available on the remote registry while maintaining parameters such as environment variables, network configurations and mounted volumes meaning you don’t lose any precious data or settings in the process. Previously I had to regularly check for individual application updates and apply them with… Read More »Spring Cleaning 2019

Hello everyone, After sending out the most recent newsletter I received feedback that many people had found the newsletter after the fact marked as spam and automatically kept it from their inbox usually by placing it in their designated spam folder for a few days/weeks/months (this will depend on the email client settings/provider) until it is purged, never to be seen. I did some investigating and spent the last few days picking away at ensuring that future newsletters/emails sent from the @dev.lightspeedta.co address via the nobreaks.ca domain. To do this a few things needed to be implemented including some DNS TXT records. I won’t get into much detail but it’s worth mentioning that the SPF, DMARC and DKIM records all work together as multiple forms of verification for messages being sent from the domain ensuring that only messages sent from authorized sources will be processed and sent out to their recipients. I got to the point where I had my SPF and DMARC records but once it came to the DKIM, something critical to the successful receipt of an email for many large providers. After some digging I was finding myself in a drought of information for the configuration of… Read More »SPF, DMARC and DKIM Woes