Dani's Blog

It's been years since I've become a fan of Drupal. This nice multi-purpose CMS helped me and users by a lot, digitalizing many manual office work that cannot be done by other CMS. But sometimes, I agree on one thing -- Drupal can be not pretty at all out of the box. Creating views with 'some' exposed filters leads to this (some, not that much actually): Oh boy, made me dizzy. Let's change it! First of all, let's turn on the twig debugging so that we can see which twig template rendering this: Change the twig.config debug parameter to true: Then clear the cache, turn on the inspect element and reload the page. I am currently using bootstrap 5 theme, we can see that the twig that renders the page is the views-exposed-form.html.twig We need to override it! Let's copy that and give it special views id -- so that only this views using this twig. My views id is 'data-ekspedisi': Clear cache, done, Drupal loads it. Easy right? Next, let's get i...

Backups are old friends for us system administrators. They're always there, ready to help us on a bad time. Just like security, sometimes backups are treated as something that's not important. Some sysadmins even think that simply just adding RAID to the server is enough to prevent any data lost due to hardware failure. Some even don't do backups at all (trust me, I know some sysadmin and some company did that). That's a big misconseptions. In lots of case, we need to restore the backup NOT because of hardware error or some astronomical disaster -- BUT human error. Human are prone to do something silly, like accidentaly removing a file in the server -- thanks to SSH and rm command. So at a fine day, I discovered the awfulness of our workplace's backup system -- and thought; This needs to change.   The old method My workplace's backup is kinda vanilla. It's just a script that compressed some folders, and then copy them to the NAS. Just in case you don't k...

While it's obvious that we should use git to manage the programmer's source codes on production servers, but TBH it's kinda annoying on the development servers. Some of our programmers also haven't learned git yet, using only the traditional way of SSH and SCP-ing the source code to the server. But this is kinda a problem for the sysadmin. SSH access meaning they can easily access the other programmer's code, even maybe deleting it or changing it without concern. We should make it better.   Separating the user I use Debian 10, Apache2, and PHP here. It is obvious that we should give one credential per programmer.  So the code is isolated to them. First as root, create the user using the using adduser command and specify the home directory to the directory that can be accessed by Apache2. On this post, I created abc user using home directory of /var/www/abc : We need to add Apache2's user to this user group so it can have the same group privilege (like rea...

 It was a peaceful noon. No phone calls, white noises came from the air conditioner, eyes struggling to be opened thanks to bunch of lunch. Then all of sudden the server was down. Phone turned into unlimited ringing, anxiety kicking in, fingers slamming keyboard frantically to check what happened. Then after some chaos, the problem solved. Manager came in, asked 'What Happened? Why?' None can explain clearly -- why? Of course, the lack of data!   Killing the comfort zone Everyday can be a pretty peaceful day when working as a sysadmin, as long as the servers and networking devices are not making any ruckus. Even when they're causing chaos, and the problem are successfully cleared by my team, the peaceful day came back. This made my company stayed in the comfort zone of 'dealing with the problems when it come and going back to sleep after it is done'.  Well, can't do a lot about that because we all busy doing any simple things anyway. Like resetting the printer o...

It is kinda rude to talk about your friend's home when you visit them. But hey, is it the same principle for company? I guess not. When I entered my workplace's data center, I came in awe. There're a lot of servers, stacking each other with beautiful blinking leds and sound of the fans. Until I came into realization -- that many servers only handed by two persons? Like wow, I have stacked jobdesks already; network, servers, and cybersecurity. Having to handle this many servers gonna cut a lot of time, even maybe two persons were not enough!  So I said hell no, I googled a lot and do a lot of research to solve this problem. I found lots of ways to minimize my workload, but in a nutshell it's divided into 2 big categories, hardware and software. At that time, optimizing software was really confusing for me. Well, I didn't have a lot of fundamentals knowledge to begin with. All I have in my arsenal pretty much self-taught thanks to Google. So I chose to optimize the ha...

Disclaimer: this article of mine only serve as historical purpose only. I don't recommend going through the same process at this year considering this is not the best method to do so (it is pretty outdated). Please just take anything good and leave the bad behind. Continuing the last post, So here I am at 2016, freshly graduated, newly employed IT employee getting a task from HR to search any trouble-related things in my team and creating a project to solve it.   Finding the problem At first month, I came into a conclusion that our team was a kinda messy IT team -- there's no clear limit on what we did. So my senior at 1PM was tweaking the database or reinstalling servers, then helping users reinstall their Thunderbird at 2PM. But hey, that's fine. The HR already told me before hand, and I think this might be a big opportunity to learn a lot. We have a monthly meeting where we will discuss anything IT related with our manager, and of course we told our report about what we ...

First of all, I am NOT a graduated IT fellow. I got my Electrical and Electronics Engineering degree back on 2016. Then how I got into IT related job? Well, here is the story. Let's start from back then. I was graduated from my college, and searching for job. Then I found a vacancy for network and security engineer at a factory near my home. At that time, it was kinda an ideal thing to work at this factory, considering it was a big factory and pretty near to my home (gonna save cost of living and transportation!). The requirements were kinda suited, where it stated can be a person with Electrical and Electronics Engineering degree or IT degree; so I gave my shot. And after a lot of corporate tests, finally I arrived at the end of the rope -- the last interview with the team and the owner of the factory. Back then there are only two left -- me and my junior back at the high school. He got an IT degree in four years, while I got my electrical and electronics engineering degree in fiv...