How to Migrate a WordPress MySQL Database

October 17, 2021October 17, 2021 - camilalui Leave a comment

I very often have to migrate MySQL Databases as I like to spend some time playing with WordPress. So here is an easy and quick way to migrate your DB and avoid manual work when moving a blog from different providers/servers.

Pre-Requisites

You must have a pre-configured MySQL server, database and user already created in the destination(new) server
You can either use command line or PHPMyAdmin if you have available in the source server
Don´t forget to backup your wordpress files/images

From PHPMyAdmin

1. Access your DB

2. Navigate to Export -> Select ¨Quick” and ¨Go¨

3. You will have a .sql file downloaded

From Command Line

1. Access your server where you are migrating from

2. Create WordPress database backup

mysqldump -u [user] -p [database_name] > your_backup_name.sql

3. Create WordPress files backup

tar -zcvf your_file_name.tar.gz /target/directory

4. Restore WordPress DB on the new server

mysql -u [user] -p [database_name]

5. Restore WordPress files on the new server

tar -zxvf [archive_name].tar.gz --directory [target_directory]

Including New Apps in the Search engine on Ubuntu

November 3, 2019April 11, 2020 - camilalui Leave a comment

If you are experiencing issues when trying to search for your recently installed software on Ubuntu, try to create this file with all the info about your software.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=x.y
Name=ProgramName
Comment=This is my comment
Exec=/home/alex/Documents/exec.sh
Icon=/home/alex/Pictures/icon.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;Application;

It needs to be placed at this path:

/usr/share/applications/

Example:

root@camistp:~# cat /usr/share/applications/x3270.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type = Application
Name = x3270
Comment = x3270
Exec = x3270
Icon = /usr/share/doc/x3270/x3270-icon2.xpm

How to use Lets Encrypt (Debian / Ubuntu)

June 29, 2019June 30, 2019 - camilalui Leave a comment

Let’s Encrypt is an SSL certificate authority managed by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). It utilizes the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) to automatically deploy free SSL certificates that are trusted by nearly all major browsers.

1. Update/Upgrade your system

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

2. Download and Install Lets Encrypt

sudo apt-get install git

3. Download a clone of Let’s Encrypt from the official GitHub repository. /opt is a common installation directory for third-party packages, so let’s install the clone to /opt/letsencrypt:

sudo git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt /opt/letsencrypt

4. Navigate to the new /opt/letsencrypt directory:

cd /opt/letsencrypt

5. Create the certificate

Run Let’s Encrypt with the --standalone parameter. For each additional domain name requiring a certificate, add -d example.com to the end of the command.

sudo -H ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --standalone -d example.com -d www.example.com

If you receive this error, stop your Apache server and try again.

Problem binding to port 80: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6.

Agree to the Terms of Service and specify if you would like to share your email address with EFF:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please read the Terms of Service at
https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf. You must
agree in order to register with the ACME server at
https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(A)gree/(C)ancel:

If all goes well, you should receive a result like this:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator standalone, Installer None
Obtaining a new certificate

IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
Your key file has been saved at:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
Your cert will expire on 2019-09-27. To obtain a new or tweaked
version of this certificate in the future, simply run
letsencrypt-auto again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your
certificates, run "letsencrypt-auto renew"
- If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:

Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate
Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le

6. Configure your Virtual Host, it should be similar to this, one entry for port 80 and a duplicated block for port 443:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
ServerAdmin example@email.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example/src/wordpress
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
ServerAdmin example@email.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example/src/wordpress
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

7. Check for the certificated domains:

sudo ls /etc/letsencrypt/live

8. All your certificated sites should be under this path, you also can check with this command:

./certbot-auto certificates

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Found the following certs:
Certificate Name: example.com
Domains: camilalui.com
Expiry Date: 2019-09-27 16:01:19+00:00 (VALID: 89 days)
Certificate Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/camilalui.com-0001/fullchain.pem
Private Key Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/camilalui.com-0001/privkey.pem
Certificate Name: camilalui.com
Domains: example.com www.example.com
Expiry Date: 2019-09-27 09:19:23+00:00 (VALID: 89 days)
Certificate Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
Private Key Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
Certificate Name: food.camilalui.com
Domains: web2.example.com
Expiry Date: 2019-09-27 16:37:52+00:00 (VALID: 89 days)
Certificate Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/web2.example.com/fullchain.pem
Private Key Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/web2.example.com/privkey.pem
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

9. Restart your Apache to apply your changes

service apache2 restart

10. Test your SSL website use:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

For more information: Let’s Encrypt Homepage

FOSDEM 2019

February 9, 2019June 30, 2019 - camilalui Leave a comment

Last weekend I attended FOSDEM 2019 and I was amazed how big is this.

Since 2001, FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by volunteers for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. It’s widely recognized as the best such conference in Europe.

Attending to the FOSDEM 2019 conference, we could have a deeply immersion in many subjects from more than 728 speakers, 776 events, and 62 different tracks.

The event itself starts only on Saturday, but at day before and after, you have the opportunity to attend to additional workshops, like Pre and Post-FOSDEM events, plus lots of other conferences awareness around the world. So it’s a great opportunity to catch up with the developers and sysadmins community and see what’s is going on at moment. The experience to be there in person is unique!

Also, all the speeches are recorded (automated!) and if you missed any speech that you wanted to watch, you can watch the videos anytime you like. I had a friend speaking on Saturday, and also anyone who wishes to give a speech is free to submit.

Picture: Janson Room

FOSDEM

https://fosdem.org/

Videos

https://video.fosdem.org/

Pre and Post-events

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pre-fosdem-mysql-day-2019-tickets-53287378985#

https://jenkins.io/blog/2019/01/21/fosdem-2019/

Important to know

Always try to wear comfortable and light clothes/shoes as you are going to walk around a lot
Mind your belongs, lots of pick pockets around and they can get very aggressive sometimes, specially late night
Use your time to spend meeting new friends and networking, thanks to the technology, you’ll have time to check out the speeches you couldn’t attend
There are many food trucks with affordable price inside the University, You’ll spend some time at the queue but it’s worth waiting for

Ubuntu with /var/lib/dpkg locked

May 28, 2018June 30, 2019 - camilalui Leave a comment

Error:
“Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock – open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)”

As soon as you have your Ubuntu 16.04 machine up provisioned by either Ansible or Vagrant, it starts a process for unattended-updates that locks the dpkg repository and any script that needs to send instructions for apt app, will fail.

This appears to be caused by a combination of an unattended-upgraded package policy set by the Debian/Ubuntu, and a change in how unattended upgrades are handled now.

In past versions of Ubuntu, unattended package upgrades were handled by creating a cron job in /etc/cron.daily responsible for running apt. With 16.04 version and the shift to systemd, unattended upgrades are handled by a systemd unit. The new systemd unit has OnCalendar set to 6am and 6pm, along with Persistent set to true. The result is that a full apt-get update && apt-get upgrade will run the first time the system boots, in order to “catch-up” with missed runs.

The idea that packages will be upgraded automatically twice a day, so what you can do is to disable the automatic apt upgrades at all.

How to disable apt automatic updates:

You have to edit this file:

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic

Change the line:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";

To:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0";

Edit this file:

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades

Change these lines:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

To:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0"
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";

Just remember to set the automatic updates ON again after your provision in case this machine is a server.

Camila Lui

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