Michael Mulligan | beLine Perspectives

Fixing Random Raspberry Pi Crashes: The NVMe TRIM Problem

November 18, 2025 12:13 pm \ by Michael Mulligan

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The Mystery

For weeks, my Raspberry Pi cluster was going offline seemingly at random. No pattern, no warning—just sudden, complete failure. And when I say complete, I mean complete: the root partition would disappear, SSH would die mid-session, and I couldn’t even run basic commands like reboot or exit. The only solution was a hard power reset.

Posted in: Uncategorized

DnD Alignment Examples

July 5, 2023 11:05 am \ by Michael Mulligan

As a new DM, I asked ChatGPT for some examples of various responses to various scenarios for the various Alignment combinations. Here is what it came up with.

Posted in: Uncategorized

February 12, 2018 4:28 pm \ by Michael Mulligan \ Aside

So my site got compromised today. Literally 5 minutes before I logged in to check some notes about WordPress Security I had written down earlier. It was pretty neat, actually.

Welp, I got it cleaned, and fixed some permissions. I’ll monitor the situation, and probably have a post about it coming around in a few weeks. I always like something neat to write about.

Cheers.

PHP: `get_class($this)` vs `static::class`

March 13, 2017 11:35 am \ by Michael Mulligan

Without getting into too much detail, I recently wanted to see what the support was like for static::class, and came across this SO answer that got me to thinking.

Posted in: Counting Cycles, Counting Opcodes, PHP, Programming

S3 (in)Sanity: When `info` doesn’t cut it.

March 28, 2016 8:54 am \ by Michael Mulligan

If you are a web developer, in this day an age, you will at some point swim a bit in the waters of the land of AWS. It is a fertile land, with many fruit, and exciting things to do, and once there, you will eventually work some with S3. S3 is fairly straight forward in it’s basic use-cases, with s3fs it’s basically just another drive, with the added bonus that you can share that drive across multiple systems and share files, like cached images or pages.

Posted in: Ops

PHP: Not Strict Equals or Strict Not Equals

March 24, 2016 1:33 pm \ by Michael Mulligan

I was wondering, in PHP land, what is more performant? Strict Not Equals ( $var !== null) or Not Strict Equals ( !($var === null)), so I did some digging, in case anyone else was wondering the same.

Posted in: Counting Opcodes, PHP

Protecting WordPress with Fail2Ban

January 27, 2016 12:23 pm \ by Michael Mulligan

When you host a WordPress site, you should consider that you are pretty much opening a backdoor to your server. It’s not quite that simple, but, as one of the most widely-used Blogging and “CMS” platforms, it is regular target for hackers, and when you consider the vast ecosystem of 3rd party Plugins and Themes (one of the main driving points of it’s popularity), hackers have a massive surface area to attack. Because of this, it is important to do what you can to protect WordPress installations from exploit and abuse. In this post I am not going to go over securing the code that runs on WordPress, but I am going to mention two things you can do using Fail2Ban to protect against unauthorized logins, and abuse of xmlrpc.php.

Posted in: Ops, Web-hosting, WordPress

Blocking Search Engines, and Yoast

January 25, 2016 10:50 am \ by Michael Mulligan

Yoast SEO is a very capable tool, it makes a lot of the SEO process very accessible to WordPress Administrators, but I discovered just the other day that it is a little lacking when it comes to blocking search engines from pages.

Posted in: WordPress

Short-cutting Fail2Ban 8.1

January 22, 2016 10:36 am \ by Michael Mulligan

If you find yourself spending a lot of time working with/on web-facing servers, you have probably heard of or used this awesome little thing called fail2ban. I am not going to get in to what it is or what it does, if you have never heard of it, you should look into it, as it is a pretty helpful tool for protecting your web-connected machines. I have been using it for some time on my AWS and personal boxes, and considered myself fairly adept at it up until the other day, when I discovered a few little tricks to slimming my jail configurations considerably.

Posted in: Ops

January 18, 2016 11:03 am \ by Michael Mulligan \ Aside

So, I got a very nice call from the Fraud Detection department working with Five County Credit Union, yesterday. Turns out, I was ordering Playground Equipment, and they didn’t think that was like me…

Well, it isn’t, and it wasn’t!

That’s pretty much the whole story: Playground Equipment, and some $1 bidding service. The only other odd bit was that the transactions were authorizations, and didn’t carry a value, so I got lucky.

Anyway, the card is flagged, closed, and I am getting a new one. Both transactions happen in the span of two days, and for the life of me I can not figure out where they would have left my sight recently. So I am guessing we are going to hear about another breach soon. Either that, or they were leaked as part of the Hannaford or Target breaches over the past few years, and it was my cards turn to get used. Either way, all is right with the world.

I will say, though. I looked at the website, and it was some pretty awesome playground equipment. I wouldn’t mind having a slide like that in my back yard…

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Author Archives: Michael Mulligan