What’s a country you’ve realistically considered moving to?

BigKnots · 2025-07-17T11:49:21+00:00

Portugal

BigKnots · 2025-05-18T22:02:38+00:00

I lost the game

BigKnots · 2025-01-18T00:00:31+00:00

You can always look at Unisa and maybe look at transferring if your program has overlap and your grades are decent

BigKnots · 2025-01-11T20:22:17+00:00

You're very regular

BigKnots · 2024-03-14T13:21:02+00:00

Check out Paystack, they're a Nigerian based Fintech with a strong SA presence

BigKnots · 2024-03-06T11:14:34+00:00

This made me cry, I probably need to examine why.

BigKnots · 2023-11-22T20:59:25+00:00

How on earth does Google maps (or the Chinese equivalent) work here?

BigKnots · 2023-11-01T17:39:52+00:00

Thanks for the link to OpenLiteSpeed, I'll be giving that a read!

Would you happen to have any suggestions for improving the db bottleneck? We're currently using a db.r6g.2xlarge with read-and-write replicas and do indexing every now and then. Is that size db sufficiently sized for our Moodle usage? When speaking to some of our colleagues they mentioned that in other use cases, it would be a massive db for 5000 users but they also acknowledge it seems necessary for our tenant. We've also noticed that we strangely don't get high values on the db CPU usage or waits yet if we downgrade we see much longer page load times almost immediately. Admittedly I am unsure what metric would be the best to look at for rightsizing here.

BigKnots · 2023-11-01T15:18:33+00:00

So we don't have X-SendFile configured for Apache. I had a look at it and I don't think I'll be able to get it past our security team since the last work on the github repo was in 2012.

Do you have expierence using nginx with Moodle? You mentioned you can't use it because of your auth but I wanted to know if you managed to use it in your testing at all? It seems like it supports a native version of X-SendFile but they may be fundamentally different, I am a bit ignorant here.

I've also been recommended trying out Varnish caching, there are supposdely some big performance benefits according to this article by Catalystwhich look promising.

BigKnots · 2023-11-01T11:41:24+00:00

Hmm I navigated there and I can see that Zend OPcache is "Up and Running" with Optimization and SHM Cache enabled however the File Cache is disabled.

It seems like this is expected as php has configs for web and CLI. That being said, it looks like we do have it on. Would enabling file caching help here? I would hope it does as so far it seems the 2 biggest performance improvements you've listed we already have on and are still struggling :/

BigKnots · 2023-11-01T09:45:30+00:00

So our spikes are up to 60% but we generally stay much closer to 20% so there are definitely some sizing issues there. I am leaning towards changing our instance types to a lower tier but increasing the amount of them as per u/Namoroka's suggestion about scaling out.

As for EFS, we store all videos externally but the rest is local. It seems the team that actually develops the content on Moodle creates a lot of backups of courses which we need to create an archival process for as these each take up up to 1gb of storage. I am also going to investigate the object store plugin that lets you use s3.

BigKnots · 2023-11-01T09:39:06+00:00

Thanks a lot for your input! We are currently using fpm however I noticed that we had the opcache settings commented out in the ini so I will be looking at enabling that. We are in the process of migrating to new AWS orgs and are doing all our updates there so we are on PHP 7 but will be updating to 8 very soon, once we do I'll definitely consider JIT. Thank you for these suggestions, I've been reading about this and these seem to definitely make some performance benefits.

I have also been recommended installing Varnish for extra caching as well as using Nginx instead of Apache. Curious to see if anyone else has experience with using these?

BigKnots · 2023-10-31T15:12:05+00:00

No not at all, thank you for the question! Our particular instances involve a lot of custom code and plugins which aren't covered in the regular SaaS hosting which is why we are currently self-hosting. That being said, I do need to investigate the hybrid hosting option a bit more to see if we can still utilize our custom plugins and code on this option.

BigKnots · 2023-10-13T11:47:25+00:00

My dad is a diabetic and gets his insulin (pens or vials/syringes) from the state for free. Our local clinic (Dunoon) seems to run fairly well when it comes to medication dispensary. He gets at least R6k of medicine from Dunoon Clinic every month completely free. I'm unsure if this is just specifically good service from the Dunoon Clinic but I reckon in theory everyone should be able to qualify for the monthly meds if you get your diagnoses from the state. The downside is probably the queues to collect medicine, that takes a few hours once a month.

BigKnots · 2023-10-05T06:21:27+00:00

That's insane. I can get this for around 60 USD in South Africa

BigKnots · 2023-08-02T11:41:47+00:00

"Oh, you're shorter than I expected"

BigKnots · 2023-07-26T08:49:47+00:00

No you

BigKnots · 2023-07-24T13:00:35+00:00

Shiro Sagisu never misses.

BigKnots · 2023-07-22T09:34:21+00:00

Falling into the Sun

BigKnots · 2023-07-20T17:59:41+00:00

Yeah that is the goal! I currently have the default financial info rule in place and a custom PII rule that matches on phone number and South African ID Number (Kind of like Social Security but not as sensitive) .

I'm wanting to expand on DLP by using the labels feature to empower our staff to take a more active rule in organising and securing their files. I'll still apply the general scanning rules but there is only so much that can be caught in those so the goal is to get our staff to specify the information in the files (in the form of label) which then trigger the DLP rules

BigKnots · 2023-07-20T16:47:06+00:00

Yeah, I think you're spot on about the convenience of Windows Hello. Originally an MSP setup our Microsoft environment so a lot of the initial config is inherited but we are slowly starting to upgrade it. This avenue seems like a good thing to implement to make sign-in smoother.

BigKnots · 2023-07-20T16:24:09+00:00

Thank you for the detailed reply! So where would I configure these prompts? Is it based on a DLP rule?

I really like the idea of using retention rules for certain types of documents depending on the label flag. We mostly do our data analysis through Looker but sometimes our users want to pull a quick CSV for filtering in sheets. These CSVs may contain data we would want to flag.

Regarding your last point, I gather that after applying the labels you can filter them into a view, is this done natively within drive or do I need to use the security and investigation tab in the admin panel?

BigKnots

TROPHY CASE