The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

I'm a tiny bit happy today.
Recently I've been noticing that I'm developing a tolerance for deeply crowded spaces. I don't know if the AC/DC concert was an effective shock therapy or something.

I'm not at the point where I can comfortably head outside into town by myself yet, but I have a feeling that it's not going to be too long until I can.
Maybe I can even find some joy in "being under people".

Maybe make some contacts, friends, whatever.
The biggest challenge will probably be getting over my, I guess "crippling" isn't the right word, but close-ish to it, self-conscious.
The worst thing is that as of yet, I have no idea why I'm still like that.
I think I know the root cause, but that's not something relevant right now.

Hell, I go out with friends, guys and girls, and eventually it goes like:
>"How come you are not dating someone?"
>"Can't really. Can't go out and fine someone, also I think I'm not good-looking enough."
>"Bullshit, you look awesome."

That's coming from close friends, hence why I don't believe it's just some "oh, he'll feel better if I compliment him" shite.
I somehow am unable to gain self worth from compliments.

[...]

In other news, I got a certificate at the FernUni Hagen for a course in IT project management.
Also, my programming and solution finding/problem solving skills are improving noticeable. I think.
I'm not in Uni or anything, but I feel like I'm getting more competent/professional in my development activities at work.

Contrary to what I stated above, I can gain self worth from good work done.
...which worries me, because I am afraid that eventually I'll only be able to feel good after having worked myself to the metaphorical bone.

In job college, I talk to my classmates.
Turns out, everybody is mostly sitting on their ass doing fuck all at work. They are telling me that I'm a workaholic.
I think that I'm either going mad, or that they are lazy fuckers.

From Wednesday to Thursday evening, three colleagues and I went to the CAS Partner Preview Day & CAS Customer Centricity Forum in Karlsruhe. Lots of talks (mostly boasting about themselves), some workshops and a lot of "networking opportunities".
Stuff which I mostly consider bullshit, but I never would've figured how effective it is to put on a smile and feign interest in things.
Some of that feigned interest turned into actual interest and we "networked" for hours.
It was a good training for social interactions outside my direct comfort zone.

Thank you for reading the ramdump of my mind.
$./felix
Segmentation Fault
Core dumped