Polishing doorknobs

Last week I wrote about making SMTP actually work beyond just the technical part of sending an SMTP message with an e-mail server, and I wrote about fixing certificates. As you might guess, it's because I went through this (again) recently, moving from a 3rd party SMTP relay back to direct from my own server, and getting a multi-san cert (again).

Another "big" thing I did is unifying all of the different software around a single database. Many pieces of software install their own database, even if you already have one. While experimenting with RainLoop, I realized this had gotten out of hand on this server - MySQL, SQLite, MS SQL Express, and MariaDB were all running (and performing the exact same function) for no good reason other than they were installed by default by just clicking "next".

So, while I updgraded the software on the server as part of normal periodic housekeeping, this go around I reconfigured everything around a single instance of MySQL 8.0. I know MariaDB is what the cool DBA kids are using these days, but I suppose some habits die hard. Now I can centrally manage and backup the data for all of the different applications, and hopefully it will give a (small) performance boost and give back a few resources to the system.

In a similar vein, I was (primarily) using Nginx as a reverse proxy and had Roundcube and some other PHP web services running on Apache server. So, I took a little bit of time to learn how to run PHP directly in the Nginx web server and retired Apache, also hopefully giving back a few resources to the system.

No major changes, but in the backend software sometimes doorknobs could use a little polishing to make everything work a little bit better today than they did yesterday.