21 July

Noted for future reference: Fixing a slow-to-boot Linux server

I have a few Ubuntu Linux VPSes that were originally spun up on the then-latest-and-greatest 16.04 LTS. Over the past year I’ve been belatedly upgrading them to 20.04 LTS. Almost without exception, all now have a really irritating flaw: where they used to reboot almost instantly — making me capriciously run OS updates involving reboots at any time of day, even on servers with a bunch of sites on them, since it only meant a blip of about 5 to 7 seconds — they were now consistently taking 2 to 5 minutes to reboot. Yikes!

Poking around, I learned that cloud-init was timing out, causing that delay, but since systems administration is just a small sliver of the work I do, I never had a chance to investigate why it was happening or really what cloud-init was even for. I just resigned myself to having to do those reboots in the middle of the night when no one would notice.

Well, I finally decided I needed to get an answer, and I found it. If I’m reading this correctly, cloud-init is really only needed during the initial creation of the VPS, and can safely be disabled after that. So, let’s do it!

touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled

I’m pleased to say, it works perfectly. I ran it on a test mirror of my biggest server and it worked, so I then applied it to the live server and… capriciously rebooted it, right in the middle of the day!

Shush. It worked.

Update (August 3, 2022): Mayyyyybe it’s a bit more complicated than what I described above. I just went into another server I had previously updated to 20.04, and I just went ahead and pre-emptively ran this before an update that required reboot. After the reboot, I could not connect to the server at all, other than through Digital Ocean’s direct access console. Thank goodness for that. It did not initially occur to me that this change might be why I couldn’t connect, but after trying a few other fixes without success, I just went in and deleted this new /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled file and rebooted, and everything came up just fine… and without any kind of delay on boot. Weird.

Internet Explorer and the centered background SVG problem

We are rapidly approaching, I believe, a time when we no longer need to worry about things that don’t work in Internet Explorer.

But we’re not there yet.

I’ve started using SVG images on the web a lot, especially for logos, which I tend to put into a flexible-width container at the top left corner of pages. Which is great, except IE has this annoying habit of resizing the canvas for SVGs to fill the container they’re in. The whole logo appears on the page, and scaled properly… but it’s horizontally centered in the container, rather than flush against the left edge.

There appear to be many possible solutions, but for a solution that is 100% fluid/responsive (that is, it will scale with the container), this does the trick.

It does involve manually editing the SVG code, but it’s simple and you only need to do it once as part of the image prep process. In the <svg> tag, look for the viewbox attribute. It will most likely consist of four numbers… 0 0 followed by the width and height of the canvas. After this attribute, simply add width="x" height="y" with the same x and y values from the viewbox attribute.

It works!

New Coltrane site launched

John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of "My Favorite Things"
I’m pleased to announce the launch of a brand new version of my John Coltrane website.

This is the first step in an ongoing process of splitting my currently mammoth website into distinct, separate websites tailored to specific content areas. Basically, each of the top-level navigation items you see at the top of this page will eventually become its own site.

For now there’s not a lot of new content on the Coltrane site — the big “draw” is the redesign itself. But I’ve added a blog to the site, and eventually I’ll also be adding a multimedia section where I’ll be featuring audio and video clips. Check it out!

This site design was also an opportunity for me to test the effectiveness of my new Room 34 Baseline WordPress theme. Believe it or not, that barebones theme really is the foundation upon which the new Coltrane site is built. So it works!

This site also takes advantage of some cutting-edge web design features: it’s built with HTML 5 and the Blueprint CSS framework, and it uses the emerging @font-face CSS method to render text in a custom font. I am using the free Museo font family throughout the site.

“Justification for Higher Education” (but not a career in education)

An old high school friend just emailed me this image. Back in school, one of our math teachers (who was not terribly passionate about his job, nor well-liked by the students) had this poster on the wall in his classroom. I think it may also have been “enhanced” with blinking red LEDs in the positions of the car taillights. At any rate, as a teenager, I somehow was never struck by the irony of an underpaid, under-appreciated, and professionally underwhelming high school math teacher displaying this poster.

It’s not that I agree with the poster’s sentiments. I think it’s pretty asinine, and certainly not my life’s aspiration anyway. But still. Who in that classroom had a higher education? Enough said.

Then again, maybe he was intending to be ironic. If so, Alanis Morrisette could take a lesson.