Of the course of many years, certain deployment packages get retired. Sun-setting as they call it in AWS. Maybe a package was replaced by another stack, maybe we no longer find it economically feasible to provide a certain deployment stack. Maybe there is little interest in a stack series, or the stack is obsolete. For… Continue reading aMiSTACX Stack Sunset Listing
Category: Maintenance
Post aMiSTACX Deployment Checklist
Although you are responsible for your AWS and aMiSTACX environment, we wanted to put together an abbreviated post deployment checklist to help remind you of areas that are commonly overlooked for security and performance.
aMiSTACX / A51 : System Status and Updates
We will post here upcoming updates, maintenance windows, features and fixes for aMiSTACX and A51. Please bookmark this page. September 18th, 2023: A51 New Account Fix During QA testing it was reported that the A51 new account creation sync operation to AWS resulted in an error. This error was the result of a previous update… Continue reading aMiSTACX / A51 : System Status and Updates
Enable CloudWatch Agent for A51 Dashboard
Our A51 dashboard supports Advanced Monitoring with AWS CloudWatch. This new feature will allow history on some important local EC2 metrics such as disk space available, memory usage, CPU utilization, CPU credits and more. Should your stack not have the CloudWatch Agent, please follow these simple steps to install on a G6/G5 stack. Note: Newer… Continue reading Enable CloudWatch Agent for A51 Dashboard
Upgrading or Removing aMiSTACX Modules for PHP 8.1
Important! Please take a FULL backup AMI image before you attempt to follow these instructions. Do NOT attempt on a live production server. You can take a full image from the AWS console and or A51. If you use RDS, also take a snaphot. If you want or need aMiSTACX to handle this upgrade or… Continue reading Upgrading or Removing aMiSTACX Modules for PHP 8.1
AWS Console SSH Web Connect
You may find yourself in a situation where for some odd reason you can’t connect via your trusted Putty or WinSCP client. With the release of Ubuntu 22, many suddenly found themselves scratching their heads to a strange key error upon connection attempts. Luckily, AWS does offer a little known way to SSH through your… Continue reading AWS Console SSH Web Connect
RDP Default User Lockout Policy
When using our stack for Windows 2012 R2 RDP, you may want to have some healthy paranoia, and set a default RDP user lockout policy. By default there is only the Administrator account, and that has no lockout policy defined. Setting one up is very easy, and takes about five minutes. Step 1. RDP into… Continue reading RDP Default User Lockout Policy
Turn Off WordPress Auto Updates
In the past, WordPress would just alert you to version updates, but since WP 5x it seems WP will update without even telling you. As many learned the hard way when WordPress 5.5 was released, WP auto-updated your sites, and many sites ended up broken. How to prevent this behavior? Just add this line to… Continue reading Turn Off WordPress Auto Updates
Composer Memory Error
Should you get a composer memory error or status message “killed” when using sudo composer upgrade on aMiSTACX, it is because of an incorrect setting w/ PHP 7.x, or the memory value is set too low. This also happens with performance stacks that do not have a swap file, thus memory becomes exhausted. Although most… Continue reading Composer Memory Error
Service Unavailable Friendly Page
Let’s face it. It is kind of embarrassing when our e-commerce site goes down with an ugly “Service Unavailable” message to your customers. Either on purpose for maintenance, or without your knowledge due to a system fault, the default “Service Unavailable” or Magento error pages are just very uninformative. A low cost DIY aMiSTACX solution… Continue reading Service Unavailable Friendly Page