Dave Drager

228 posts
Dave Drager is the Founder & Principal Technical Architect at Franklin Smart. He has written previously for the technology sites Lifehacker and MakeUseOf. And formerly the CTO of XDA Developers.

Exporting Announcements from WHMCS

Doing some integration work with WHMCS, I found the need to export some of the announcements into Wordpress. Since there isn’t any native implementation of this, I found the best way is to export it directly from the database. The PHP code to do this is fairly easy…
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The Dirty Little Secret About SSL Certificates

The dirty little secret about SSL certificates is that: Anyone can become a certificate authority. The tools to become a certificate authority, and therefore to publish your own SSL certificates, is included in a wide variety of systems – chances are if you have an Ubuntu or CentOS install you already have the capability of becoming an SSL certificate authority via OpenSSL.
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What a Resilver Looks Like in ZFS (and a Bug and/or Feature)

At home I have an (admittedly small) ZFS array set up to experiment with this neat newish raid technology. I think it has been around long enough that it can be used in production, but I’m still getting used to the little bugs/features, and here is one that I just found. After figuring out that I had 2 out of 3 of my 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives fail, I had to give the array up for a loss and test out my backup strategy. Fortunately it worked and there was no data loss. After receiving the replacement drives in from RMA, I rebuilt the ZFS array (using raidz again) and went along my merry way. After 6 months or so, I started getting some funky results from my other drive. Thinking it might have some issue as with the others, I removed the drive and ran Seatools on it (by the way, Seatools doesn’t offer a 64-bit Windows version – what year is this?). The drive didn’t show any signs of failure, so I decided to wipe it and add it back into the array to see what happens. That, of course, is easier said than done.
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