I'm not a sysadmin, but I end up doing my best now and then when one of my sites gets into trouble. This is a sort of "after action report" of an incident that I just resolved (hopefully). I woke up and happened to check email on my phone (don't always do this, will now) and was greeted with a uptime robot email that one of my sites was down, and had been for about 4 hours. I quickly checked the site on my phone and yup, it wasn't loading. Ran to the office and hopped on my laptop. SSH to the server, and everything seems fine. Very little load on the server (AWS instance). Did a restart of apache/php/mysql and the site is still down. Weird. Running the site's index.php file on the command line works as expected and fast. Ask a few other people to check, and it's down for them. Then I logged into the AWS console and checked on status there - everything is up and running.... WTF? This is a lightsail instance, and then I noticed the outgoing network traffic h...
So I've been using WSL (Windows System Linux) for well over a year ago. I started with WSL 1 and then moved WSL 2 recently. All in all it's been a pretty smooth ride. I decided to ditch my mac after well over a decade of using macs and move to Windows. I wasn't happy with the price of the hardware I was getting for that price. Windows is better than it used to be... but that's not really saying much. And I've always been firmly in the Linux world when it comes to web development and hosting. So what to do? WSL fills the bill perfectly. Right now I have Ubuntu installed - all I have to do is open a Windows terminal window and type 'wsl' and I'm in a nice comfy linux world. Start up apache and MySQL, open localhost in my browser and I'm working off my local environment, almost like I was using MAMP. I did consider setting up dual-boot Windows and Linux - but my laptop just doesn't have the disk space for that. Upgrade the disk is an option, but tr...