Lightroom Classic hangs during import

For a few weeks, I have experienced an interesting issue in Adobe Lightroom – during import application will become unresponsive and no files would be processed. Please note that photos are stored on NAS and there is some heavy traffic involved while images are being manipulated and rearranged. Much research did not reveal anything useful. In forums, there will be suggestions about turning off antivirus and firewalls, changing registry settings, etc. with no cure. Lightroom does not show any errors, there is no trace in the event log, yet there is something very wrong deep inside. Normally NAS can be accessed without any issues and there is no indication of any problems. As a next step I tried to simulate Read more…

DevOps in the Era of Agile

Development and IT in the Era of Agile need to evolve. I am reading LinkedIn, following up on various companies, and often come across the term DevOps in various flavors. The term is popular but there is a great difference in what it means for different people as goals are changing. For many years we knew very well the role of the IT department and of its important responsibilities. On the other side of the “fence”, we had software development teams. Time of Agile Software development went through drastic changes in recent years – waterfall, XP, and now Agile. The main goal of these changes was to improve the effectiveness of the software development teams. It involved the proactive discovery Read more…

Database as a Service, High Availability, Horizontal Scalability, and Multi-master Architecture

DISCLAIMER: This post intended to aggregate research performed while evaluating various DB solution fitting specific requirements. While it may be a bit lengthy, I hope it would give the reader good starting point while deciding which path to take. SkySQL was reviewed in more details, and this article presents in-depth review of “last-mile” considerations. The intent is not to force reader into particular solution, but to share all accumulated information. Introduction While deciding about changes to the database layer at the core of your system many questions and concerns are being raised. Will my system perform as expected after migration? How much effort is required to migrate existing solution? Will it require serious code refactoring? How a new DB solution Read more…

Death of CentOS? NOT… Think “rebirth” instead

I am active user of CentOS in production for many years and counting. While Windows was and still is my OS of choice on desktop, actively using WordPress and LAMP stack in general lead me to CentOS as a base platform to host our web applications and solutions. We are now equally using Debian in our deployments. When RedHat announced shift of focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream in December of last year it caused a stir in Linux/CentOS community. It was still acknowledged that announcement was botched and misleading. For me bells started to ring when IBM first acquired RedHat. Usually such changes lead to more “enterprisy” approach. And year later we now see it happening. How can Read more…