Now I feel that is the time to get them all. So I’ve re-started this process by getting another certification. Now I can proudly say that I am an AWS Certified Developer. This is certification #2.

There are still three certifications I want to get:
– AWS Certified Sysop Adminstrator – Associate
– AWS Certified Devops Engineer – Professional
– AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

I am doing these not because I really need them (for my job for example). I am doing them because they keep me on the right track with my learning initiatives and they always push me to be even better at what I do.

The post AWS Certified Developer first appeared on Lacisoft's.

I’ve learned Python and Node.js and I’m working mostly with these. I have worked on some really cool projects with these languages . Also I have focused mostly on cloud architectures (apps) that run in the AWS cloud.

If you know this blog since the days I’ve written about TYPO3 then you should know that I’m pretty much done with that subject. It’s not likely that there will be anymore TYPO3 posts on this blog. In fact there will be less technical posts, I will focus here on personal thoughts and opinions. I will still do posts about technology from time to time but for those I’ve started something new, something that I’m not yet ready to share. But you will find out about it soon.

As you can see the blog received a new theme but some posts might not look right. I’m working on fixing those but it might take me a while to get things in order. So, see you the next time.

The post Long time no see first appeared on Lacisoft's.

With this conviction I have decided to go all in and to become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect. Today I attended the certification exam in Cluj (you can now take an AWS certification exam in Cluj at Centrul de Informatica) and obtained my certification. My first AWS certification. Because I’m planning to get them all. I started with the Solutions Architect – Associate Level because that is a prerequisite in order to get the Professional Level.

The exam was pretty tough, there were a lot of questions which needed very careful consideration and attention. The possible answers were very similar and you needed to take into consideration nuances from within the question to determine the correct answer. A big help in studying for this exam were the courses offered by acloud.guru. They certainly make the exams easier and you kinda know what kind of questions to expect.

With this certification in my pocket and with further work and study I plan to do some interesting things. Stay tuned because another interesting announcement related to this is coming soon!

The post Just become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level first appeared on Lacisoft's.

One other thing I find odd is the name of the conference – Codecamp. If we are talking about a camp, specifically a barcamp then the format is wrong as barcamps are user generated events. That means the talks are established on site from proposals and are voted by the audience. Even if we are not talking about a barcamp the term camp and specifically “codecamp” takes my mind to an event where mostly programmers gather and do workshops were they code together and build some stuff. However the format of this event is a format of a plain regular conference with sessions ranging from technical stuff to more theoretical business topics.

Well these two issues I mentioned above didn’t made me enjoy the conference less. There were quite some number of interesting talks, I enjoyed meeting some old friends, having fun and learning things. The interest for the event was huge from what I could tell. There were several hundred attendees (one thousand+ according to their website), from programmers to testers, from business analysts to project managers, from freelancers to CEO’s, all categories of the Cluj IT scene were present. This great interest shows that the Cluj IT community needs these kinds of events. And considering the amount of people working in IT in Cluj (outsourcing or building products) I think there is room for even more events like Codecamp. Or as I said in the first paragraph maybe it’s time to make this event a longer one.

The post Impressions from Codecamp Cluj – autumn edition first appeared on Lacisoft's.

No tragedies here, everyone is being offered alternatives. I was offered to choose between several available projects in the company I’m working for.  Another option that crossed my mind would have been to look for alternatives at other companies as an employee. Or I could start my own thing / work as a freelancer. All these options started a wild race in my head and as a result I had a last weekend full of thinking, reasoning, doubts, hopes and so on.

But I have come to the conclusion that I owe myself to choose the third option. Now is the best moment to do that. So starting with next month I’m self employed (I still have notice period and things to wrap up).  I always wanted to try to work on my own. I have several ideas and several projects I started during the past years but never had the time or the determination to take them to the next level. Now is that time!

My projects will need time to bake, so during this time I will do other things as well. I really like working on challenging projects  and learning new stuff all the time. So I will also work as a contractor/freelancer. I already have a few leads, let’s see which of them materializes. However I only plan to take on projects if the project is worth it from a technical perspective. In December I’m planning to take my certification on AWS as a solutions architect and all projects that involve AWS cloud architectures will have priority over others, at least in the near future. Projects that interest me are applications written in frameworks like Flow Framework (formerly of the TYPO3 family), Symfony 3 but also applications that are based on TYPO3 and I really mean applications or extension development, not presentation websites.

It’s a big leap for me as I don’t really have anything certain in my pocket. Let’s hope it turns out to be a good move!

The post A new beginning first appeared on Lacisoft's.

However when I created an AMI from the snapshot and launched this AMI into a new instance, the instance wouldn’t start. In the AWS EC2 console when you right click on the instance in the context menu you can select Instance Settings -> Get System Log. Looking at this system log I could see the following error message:

EXT3-fs: sda1: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (240).
EXT2-fs: sda1: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (244).
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

So now it was clear that the instance is not working because it can’t mount the required volumes. After digging around a little bit I found why this happens.  When launching the replacement instance from the snapshot I used the default Amazon Kernel Image (AKI). However this default AKI doesn’t support it seems the features that were used in the original AMI that was using a custom kernel image.

So the solution to this problem is to look-up your original instance and see what AKI it uses. Then when launching the instance from the backup snapshot choose this kernel image instead of the default one. And it will work.

The post Mount issues when restoring EC2 instances from snapshots first appeared on Lacisoft's.

So why there are so many http sites out there? Why people expose their users and their data to unsecure access ? There are a variety of reasons. Some people are just lazy, others consider the setup of the certificates too complicated and of course there is also a cost involved in buying the digital certificate. Well, guess what ? 2 out of these 3 reasons went away when AWS launched the Amazon Certificate Manager. Not only that they’re offering SSL certificates for free but the deployment of the certificate can be done in a few clicks. There is no more CSR requests to be made, no more hassle in configuring the server. You just request a certificate and deploy it on your Elastic Load Balancer or your Cloudfront Distribution, all this without any additional cost. To do this Amazon have setup their own Certificate Authority called Amazon Trust Services LLC (https://www.amazontrust.com) and they’re using this to issue the certificates.

That was the good news, the bad news is for people who use other hosting or cloud providers. You can only use these free certificates on the AWS infrastructure and even there you can deploy a free SSL certificate on an Elastic Load Balancer or a Cloudfront Distribution (as of the writing of this article).

I’ve already deployed SSL certificates on all my websites, you can see that this very blog is using an SSL certificate and can be accessed only via https.

So if you’re on AWS infrastructure then you have no excuse  not to use an SSL certificate and a secure connection to your app/website.

The post Free SSL certificates from Amazon Web Services first appeared on Lacisoft's.

This can be easily fixed once you know what the problem is. The fix is adding the following line to either your httpd.conf or your .htaccess file:

SetEnvIfNoCase X-FORWARDED-PROTO "^https$" HTTPS

This tells PHP scripts (so WordPress too) that we are already running in HTTPS. Basically it’s translating the header that the AWS Elastic Load Balancer sends (X-Forwarder-Proto: https).

BONUS: How do you redirect all incoming HTTP requests to HTTPS?

Now that you can load HTTPS pages you also need to redirect all incoming HTTP requests into HTTPS requests because you might have incoming links from search engines or referrers which still link to your old HTTP pages. We do that with the following rewrites in either httpd.conf or .htaccess file

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Translated to human language this means that if the server finds no HTTPS header from the AWS Elastic Load Balancer (X-Forwarded-Proto is not HTTPS) then it will do a 301 redirect to HTTPS preserving the server name and the incoming request URI.

Well, that’s it. This is how i fixed my problems today.

The post Fixing infinite redirects when HTTPS is enabled on WordPress behind an AWS Elastic Load Balancer first appeared on Lacisoft's.

However for EC2 you don’t have FTP credentials because FTP is disabled and also ports are blocked. You could try to unblock these and install FTP but that is pointless as it just opens a security hole on your infrastructure. So the best thing is to enable updates without FTP. And that is possible but you need to enable the Apache web server access to your WordPress folders.

You can do that pretty easily, just run the following command in your Linux machine’s terminal:

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html

In some cases it might happen that your apache user is not “apache” but “www-data”. If this is the case just replace “apache” with “www-data”. That’s it. Now you should be able to update your WordPress with just a click from the admin interface of your blog.

The post One click updates or automatic updates for a WordPress blog hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance first appeared on Lacisoft's.

So I’ve been digging around to find the cause of this problem and i had not much luck for a while. All I could figure out that it was some kind of a database error involved. But after some debugging i managed to narrow it down to the wp_posts table and the fact that the ID column didn’t have an auto increment flag set. After I’ve added auto increment to this column my problem went away. Only to discover that i had some other problems like images cannot be uploaded and attached to posts. Guess what ? The problem was in the database as well. And it was also the lack of auto increment on the wp_postmeta table. So I went and added auto increment to that one and also to a few other tables where i considered that an auto increment is missing and it could be needed.  So far so good, it’s working.

So it is as simple as that. If you encounter this error you might be able to fix it just by adding auto increment to the ID column in the wp_posts table and some other tables that doesn’t have this option set.

The post What to do when WordPress throws you the error: You are not allowed to edit this post first appeared on Lacisoft's.