My Junior year at UC Berkeley, I became a part of Karen Nakamura's Disability Lab. At Dislab, I got the chance to work on a variety of projects, inlcuding the Radical Accessible Mapping Project, and their website disabilitylab.berkeley.edu. and I work with the Open Computing Facility to manage the technology side of their site.
When I began working with my peers on the RAMP engine, I was able to propose several accepted changes, including:
Developing an on-boarding process for new members Creating a design document to facilitate collaboration across members of our team Having plans approved by lab management before dedicating resources.
During Summer 2021, our previous web developer stepped down, which meant it was time for someone to inherit the project as the Disability lab's new Site Reliability Engineer. At first, it seemed my job was rather simple. The site wouldn't show up on google search, so I figured I would have to make a google search console account, index the site manually, and then play with SEO for a bit.
But as the great Nicholas Weaver once said, "on the internet everything is more broken than you think." Moments after I inherited this project, and before I had even touched anything the entire website went offline. A classic "Server not found" error.
I traced the route to the URL through Berkeley’s DNS servers, and used ssh to connect to the host machine to inspect the server logs. I discovered in my investigation that at numerous locations throughout the config files we were using www.disabilitylab.berkeley.edu and disabilitylab.berkeley.edu as if they were interchangeable. I set the paths to all agree with the Berkeley DNS server (since getting that changed would’ve been much harder) and while I was at it I set up the site to use HTTPS for all connections.
But we weren't out of the woods yet. When attempting to access the site admin pane, content writers informed me that they kept encountering an access denied message when they attempted to edit site content. I further inspected our server VM, and realized that we couldn't make changes because we had filled our partition of disk space.
I contacted a friend at the university's server hosting center and convinced him to increase our partition size. As it turned out, because we were a university affiliated research group we should’ve had access to a larger partition from the start. Once I submitted the proper documentation, the server was running smoothly, and so I began teaching myself and the rest of the website-content team how to set up each page for SEO, and submitted the new site to be indexed. Find us at disabilitylab.berkeley.edu or search "Berkeley Disability Lab" in google today!