The ISPConfig Database Prefix That Broke My WordPress Import
A WordPress database import failed because I confused application-friendly names with ISPConfig’s actual multi-tenant database identities.
srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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Building a Local WordPress Workshop with Docker
How I built a safer local WordPress workshop with Docker, MariaDB, real production content, and a bind-mounted child theme.
The Calendar Became The Performance Test
Archive note, October 18, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad calendar and architecture documentation from October 2025 through early 2026. The calendar started as an event-discovery feature. It became a test of whether the whole platform could behave like a production system. An entertainment site can publish articles all day and still fail readers … Read more
Security Hardening A Small PHP Portal
Archive note, October 2025: This post is based on BDC.aztexsystems security audit and remediation notes. Operational details have been generalized. Small internal tools have a way of becoming production tools before anyone admits it. That is dangerous because the assumptions are different. A development tool can tolerate rough edges. A production portal that handles images, … Read more
Two VMs And A Fiber Line
Archive note, October 17, 2025: This post is based on SoCalNomad infrastructure documentation from late 2025. The production architecture I am proudest of was not large. It was disciplined. SoCalNomad ran from a home Proxmox environment on a residential fiber connection with a business account. The public side looked like an ordinary HTTPS site. Behind … Read more
The Image Tool That Became Shared Infrastructure
Archive note, October 2025: This post is based on BDC.aztexsystems image-tool notes and later Markit image-pipeline decisions. The BDC image tool started as a practical helper. Email campaigns needed images in predictable sizes. Vehicle photos, logos, footers, banners, and promotional graphics all had to fit templates. Manually resizing and converting assets over and over was … Read more
Docker DNS And The First Black Box Lesson
Archive note, October 2, 2025: This post is based on the September 27, 2025 Docker networking troubleshooting notes. One of the earliest SoCalNomad automation failures looked like an AI problem. It was not. The workflow was supposed to let n8n call a local LLM service running in another Docker container. The model was up. n8n … Read more
The First Newsroom Was A Filter
Archive note, September 29, 2025: This post follows the September 2025 SoCalNomad workflow-design notes. The first serious SoCalNomad automation problem was not writing articles. It was deciding what did not deserve to become one. The early ambition was obvious enough: collect Southern California entertainment stories from many sources, filter them, synthesize useful coverage, and publish … Read more
SoCalNomad Was Never Just a Website
Archive note, September 27, 2025: This post is based on early SoCalNomad project documentation from September and October 2025. SoCalNomad started with a modest public premise: Southern California entertainment, events, photography, and local culture. The engineering premise was less modest. I was not trying to stand up a brochure site. I was trying to build … Read more
TrueNAS, Proxmox, And The Photography Workflow
Archive note, September 2025: This post is based on SweedestMoments infrastructure notes for photography storage and workflow planning. Photography infrastructure has a different center of gravity than a normal website. The website matters. The portfolio matters. Client galleries matter. But the irreplaceable asset is the photo archive: RAW files, edited masters, exports, catalogs, and the … Read more