FluentSMTP is a WordPress plugin that allows sending email via many different email providers. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is one of many that it supports.

The instructions for setting up an IAM user grant access to everything in SES and SNS by using the predefined AmazonSESFullAccess policy, and for some reason the AmazonSNSFullAccess policy. I’m not sure why they ask for SNS permissions at all!

I’m a proponent the principal of least privilege, so after some trial, I found that this policy grants access only to what is needed:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "ses:SendEmail",
                "ses:SendRawEmail"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:127069677361:configuration-set/enter-your-configuration-set-name-here",
                "arn:aws:ses:us-east-1:127069677361:identity/enter-your-domain-name-here"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "ses:ListIdentities",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Make sure to change the placeholders enter-your-configuration-set-name-here and enter-your-domain-name-here with your actual values. If you want, you seem to be able to get rid of the separate permission for ses:ListIdentities after the Email Provider is saved. It just uses that permission to validate that the IAM credentials are valid.

I’m sure they are trying to keep the configuration steps to a minimum, and creating a separate policy would make a not-exactly-simple setup process even more complicated. But I wish that they would add these minimal permissions to their instructions as an option at least. And remove the mention of AmazonSNSFullAccess because it is not needed at all.

After we heard that the Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser was shutting down, my wife and I decided to make a second trip to enjoy it while we still could. Our first visit was shortly after it opened with our six teenage kids. This time it was just adults, so we got to “play” ourselves a little more than when kids were there.

The Star Cruiser is a very unique experience that has been tough for others to describe – which is probably why they haven’t been able to stay busy enough to keep it going. It’s a mix of hotel, restaurant, cruise ship, theater, improv, theme park, escape room and video game, all in the setting of a Galaxy Far, Far awayI

For the ~86,000 people that were able to experience it, there was an impressive amount of innovation on display and to experience.  Below are the things that I thought of, but please comment below if you can think of any that I missed or would like to clarify.

These are not in any particular order, except I tried to put some that I was most impressed with toward the end.

#1 – Custom music, songs for Gaya

The galactic superstar, Gaya, has a pretty important role throughout the voyage, often simply to distract the First Order from the smuggling going on under their noses.  Gaya has had custom songs written for her that I didn’t think were particularly great, but she belts them out with confidence as part of the story.

#2 – Custom Lighting and scents

By no means is this the first instance of Disney using custom lighting or smells, but it these elements are present from the moment you board the Halcyon, and throughout most of the “storytelling” parts of the experience.

#3 – Real emergency versus “in show” emergency

While “boarding” the ship, shortly after going through Security and before traveling “up” to the ship, there is a short orientation video that differentiates between a “Show” alarm and an actual emergency.  The In-Show alarm has strobing red lights and a droid voice stating to meet in the lobby. The actual emergency includes bright white lights and a human voice clearly stating that “this is a real emergency” and “this is not part of the show”.

#4 – Emergency exits from windowless rooms

The most under-utilized innovation which likely required a significant amount of design, construction, and testing is the emergency evacuation procedures from the windowless cabins.  Each stateroom has a small emergency exit window that is visible on the building exterior.  Within the cabin, this opens a narrow passage that presumably further opens to the exterior.  A phone and labels in the space are meant to connect guests to emergency staff that can assist in an evacuation.  

The Reedy Creek Fire Department was trained on how to assist guests in evacuating from these rooms and could do so quickly in an emergency.

#5 – Entire Bridge Experience

The bridge training experience, and subsequent story element where you commandeer the bridge is a pretty fun experience and one of the highlights for myself. There are four stations (Systems, Weapons, Cargo, and Shields). You get a chance at each of the four stations, where each one is taught in one to two minutes. Then you get a 1-2 minute practice round, and a 2-3 minute “real” round to count your score.

The controls are pretty simplistic and kind of “1990s” in design complexity.  But they are pretty effective for the short time frame in which you can learn and then use them.

#6 – Puzzles in the engineering room, access to doors, etc.

Similar to the Bridge Experience, the Engineering room has probably 8 different “puzzles” that you can solve with physical props like levers, buttons, and switches.  These can be fun to solve on their own, but they are also involved in several parts of the story. Depending on which storyline you are following, the First Order commander may meet you in the Engineering Room to “Take Over” the ship by everyone in the group solving the various puzzles simultaneously.  Or the Captain may take you to the Engineering room to also do the same puzzles and “take back” the ship.

#7 – Room droid’s voice recognition

Each cabin has a console where you can check in with the guest experience droid, who has an ongoing story of her own that ties in with the overall story on the ship. Guests can speak to the droid, which uses some now-commonplace speech recognition to understand what you are saying and respond mostly appropriately.

#8 – Custom schedule for each group

This is another not super-impressive innovation, because it is just scheduling, but I can’t think of another place in Disney Parks/Resorts or other places that schedules guests for smaller group events.  Sometime after checking in, you get events in your schedule (inside the Data Pad app) that assign you a custom time for Lightsaber Training, Bridge Training, and a departure time for the Batuu shuttle. The first two of these are specifically for you, and if you miss them, it may not be possible to make them up. The shuttle to Batuu is more flexible as it runs every ~5 minutes and you can come and go as you please after the majority of guests have exited.

#9 – All exterior Screens when ship goes to hyperspace

A nice integration that takes place on a wide scale is that every “exterior” window of the ship that looks out into space are all synchronized so that they all work together and display the status of the ship in the story.  When one of the bridge training crews jumps to Hyperspace, every window in every cabin, and throughout the ship also goes into Hyperspace.  When you arrive in an asteroid field, all of the “windows” show asteroids appropriately. 

#10 – Audio that follows characters on the upper stage area

One of the “stages” on which the actors play out their story is in the balcony above the atrium. From their elevated position, they argue with each other and eventually fight.  The characters often wander back and forth along the balcony and their amplified voices follow them impressively well by using disguised speakers on the railings. The speakers also have a few special effects in the closing battle.

#11 – Secret merchandise compartments

This low-tech innovation is kind of a fun part of the story.  If you talk with the merchandise cast members when the store is empty and subtly mention that you are part of the Resistance and tell them a certain phrase, they will use a magnet to unlock one of several secret compartments in the store that contains merchandise for those willing to help the resistance cause.

#12 – Constantly Progressing, Real-Time Story

After two visits, I still don’t know that I’ve completely followed the story, even with the character that I was following pretty closely. In every other theme park or interactive experience I can think of, the guest fully experiences the entire experience as it was intended. During the Galactic Starcruiser experience, it is literally impossible to catch every aspect of what is happening. Since the story progresses in real-time, things are happening which you have to learn about by other guests telling you about, or by context afterwards.  

On my first visit, I was a little put-off by this and having “missed out” on important things, but I was fascinated by it this time knowing that you aren’t supposed to see everything yourself.  It is much more “real” feeling as in the way we’d experience things outside of the fabricated “rides” and “lands” that we’re used to.

#13 – Lightsaber Training

The lightsaber training has been called elementary by some, and is an important part of the experience to others. I only got to experience it on one of my two trips because they were very strict about the start time and not letting anybody enter once it had begun.

#14 – Rey’s lightsaber 

Much has been written about Rey’s “real” lightsaber, which is seen for a few seconds while it extends before she (often clumsily) swaps it out for one that can be used in the fight.  They even went so far as to file a patent for this innovation

#15 – Custom Sabacc gameplay/rules

A custom version of the game Sabaac was created called “Coruscant Shift”. This version is easy to learn, and, probably more importantly, had rules that didn’t require anything too fancy for the custom Sabacc Holoboard to implement.

#16 – Sabacc holoboard

In the center of the Sublight Lounge is a large, custom Sabacc table game that displays the cards to each player using holograms.  There’s nothing like it and the Imagineers had to create it with custom electronics and screens that showed the holograms.  Again, the gameplay is pretty primitive and simple, but this was probably a fairly significant project to bring together.

#17 – ‘Nearness’ to the characters gains you ‘familiarity’

In the Data Pad app, under your profile, it displays a “nearness” and “trust”  of the main characters.  As far as I can tell, the “nearness” to a character has to do with time that you have actually spent in physical proximity to the character.  I’m unsure exactly how they accomplish this. Most likely it is some kind of NFC tracking built into the Magic Band, or Bluetooth scanner in the App. There are also times, I found, where the character asks for and repeats your name, so perhaps there is an audio prompt as well (or perhaps it is just the actor genuinely trying to remember your name).   

Being “near” to a character seems to unlock certain story arcs and messages you have with them in the app.  Note that according to this interesting video, being near to a character in public places may gain you familiarity with the character, but you have to take actions in favor of the character to gain reputation.

#18 – Transport to Batuu

The box truck that is decked out as a space transport ship does a great job of keeping you “in-world” for the ~5 minute ride between the Galactic Starcruiser building and the in-park entrance to Batuu.  If you think about it, you can tell that you’re riding in the cargo section of a box truck, but if you don’t think about it too much, the interior of the vehicle and the music do a good job of continuing the story.

#19 – Integration between app, characters, terminals, experiences on Batuu, Droid in the room

As a systems engineer and business owner, I have some glimpses at all of the various systems, both technical and people-related that have gone into putting this entire experience together.   One of the most impressive aspects to me is that it all “works” and relatively transparently to the guest. This involves multiple departments and mostly unrelated backend systems talking together.

The simplest of examples is that your excursion into Batuu includes meals, which integrates with Disney Dining Plans to make them included.

As a more complexe example, consider that  boarding the shuttle to Batuu unlocks messages in the datapad app opon your arrival in the park.  They also scan you into the park (similar to going through the front entrance), and they enable Lightning Lanes in yet another Disney system so that you can experience the two attractions without waiting in the full line.  These are many separate backend systems that are integrated together fairly seamlessly to the guest.

#20 – Storytelling with improv

Improv certainly isn’t new.  And acting certainly isn’t new.  But it seems to be a pretty new skill to move a story forward while interacting with guests in the context of a different universe. I was surpsised by the depth of knowledge from the actors about obscure characters and designs. For example, my brother-in-law wearing a logo of some kind, and a couple of characters on the “antique” design as it was from the timeline of the original movies, but the StarCruiser is set during the last trilogy.  

The actors also did a fantastic job of being accessible and including everybody that wanted to participate in their story.  On each of my trips, there were a couple of guests that stood out in being on their side” and the actors would include in the story and narrative.

#21 – Letter from Croy after he’s arrested

And finally, after the story concludes, the actors stay around for a bit and the guests tend to tell them “thank you” and kindof wind up that relationship.  The actors, of course do a great job of staying in character while being gracious.  However Lt Croy is arrested as part of the final event, so he’s not around to talk with.  That was a bit of a disappointment as we spent most of our time with him and the First Order on our second trip.  

In one of my favorite little details, when we arrived back at the cabin at the end of the night, there was a letter from Lt Croy explaining that he’s devising a way to get back to his station, and thanking us for efforts in assisting the First Order!

What else did you notice that I missed?  I’m sure there is plenty more. Let me know in the comments below!

The InnoDB History List Length is an important metric the I continuously need to check and monitor. Especially on database servers with a write-heavy workload. I’ve been bitten several times when the MySQL server seems to be operating fine, but it gets a huge backlog of writes.

You can issue the show engine innodb status; command to see the whole InnoDB status, which includes the History List Length, like this:

------------
TRANSACTIONS
------------
Trx id counter 725255284309
Purge done for trx's n:o < 725255284309 undo n:o < 0 state: running but idle
History list length 12

But that can be easily lost in the huge wall of text.

Somewhere around the release of MySQL 8, you can obtain this important metric from a straightforward query

select count from information_schema.innodb_metrics where name = 'trx_rseg_history_len';

mysql> select count from information_schema.innodb_metrics where name = 'trx_rseg_history_len';
+-------+
| count |
+-------+
|    16 |
+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

I've you're an AWS / RDS customer, I'd love to have the History List Length to be a native graph available with all MySQL instances. I wrote a request for this on AWS re:Post if you feel like voting it up.

With the Galactic Starcruiser at Walt Disney World closing at the end of September 2023, I was able to visit a second time and made a lot of notes on this amazing experience.    This is part of a series of posts as I contemplate what made it so unique, why it was cancelled, and what may happen with the building after September

Number of Voyages

First Sailing: March 1st -3rd 2022 

Final Sailing Sept 28th-30th 2023

There are 576 days between those dates, so 288 voyages were possible

Sailings Canceled:

Sept 27th and Sept 29th due to Hurricane Ian

Nine voyages were said to be canceled due to low attendance, but probably were filled since the termination was announced:  (July 4, 12, 17, August 1, 7, 15, 27, September 4, and 12)

Total Voyages:  286 voyages

 

How many guests are on each voyage?

I’m looking to arrive at two different numbers: the absolute maximum capacity, and the expected capacity, since not every room is filled to the full capacity all of the time.

 

Available Cabins:

I found this graphic from wdwnt.com:

 

Based on the above floor plan from wdwnt.com, I calculated 102 total cabins, with maximum occupancy of 504)

• 72 regular cabins (up to 5 guests)
• 24 suites (up to 4 guests)
• 6 captain suites (up to 8 guests)

But that is assuming the same layout on each of the three floors.  Another of their articles cites 100 cabins, which consists of 94 Standard cabins, 4 Suites, and only two Grand Captain Suites.  That equates to 506 possible guests, so basically the same number.

It’s important to note that both of these calculations are with every bed of every room filled to capacity. However cabins frequently only have two guests per cabin. So how can I estimate the expected capacity? I did this by counting the number of seats in the dining room.

 

Dining Room Seats

Version One – My observation

• Higher Level, outside bench seats
  • 13x 4 seaters (52 total)

• Floor level, outside
  • 11x  4-seat one side (44 total)
  • 6x 4-seat other side (24 total)

• Floor Level, inside
  • 2x 8 seats (16 total) 
  • 1x long 12 seats (12 total)
  • 2x round 5 seats (10 total)
  • Captains table with 12 seats (12 total)
  • 2x round 5 seats (10 total)
  • 1x long 12 seats (12 total)

• 2x corner 4 seats (8 total)

Total by my count: 200

 

Dining Room Seats, based on Floor Plan:

• Higher Level, outside bench seats
  • 13x 4 seaters on (52 total)

• Floor level, outside
  • 42 on bottom (42 Total)
  • 28 on top (ramp takes up some space) (28 Total)

• Floor Level, inside
  • 0x 8 seats 0
  • 2x long 12 seat 24
  • 4x round 5 seats 20
  • Captains table with 12 seats 12
  • 2x corner ~6 seats 12

Total Seating Capacity, based on image: 190

Since there are two dinner seatings, around 380-400 seems to be the max planned capacity, which equates to an average of 4 guests per room.

Total Guests experiencing Galactic Starcruiser:

Some early voyages were filled to capacity, and we know that some of the latest voyages had few enough guests that the voyages were cancelled and there was only one dinner seating, so those must have had fewer than 200 guests. Both times that I visited (once when it was pretty new, and once after the cancellation was announced), the dining rooms were mostly full. So I’m comfortable guessing an average of about 320 guests on an average voyage.

With 285 voyages, that means around 91,200 guests will have been able to experience the Galactic Starcruiser

Repeat Visitors

Some guests have been able to visit the Galactic Starcruiser more than once.  On our first visit, just a couple months after it opened, the security guard mentioned that “some crazy Club 33 member” had been eleven times already. Antecdotally, from the couple facebook groups I’ve been a part of, and from talking with others while there, I’d estimate 5% of guests on any voyage that have visited before, so I’l estimate that around 86,000 unique guests will have been able to experience it before it closes at the end of September, and around 4,000 guests have been able to visit it more than once

Cast Members:

How much staff does it take to operate the Galactic Starcruiser?  Below are my estimates, based on observation and some reasoning.

• Entertainment Staff:
  • Actors   (17 roles x 2 cast members per roll = 34 + a couple shadowing/training)
    • Raithe Kole
    • Gaya
    • Ouannii (musician)
    • Sandro
    • Captain Keevan
    • Cruise Director Lenka Mok
    • Sammie
    • Lt Croy
    • Chewbacca
    • Stormtrooper
    • Stormtrooper
    • Rey
    • Kylo Ren
    • 4x Saja
  • Back Stage (estimates)
    • Tech Crew:  6
    • Makeup 6
    • Costuming 4

 

• Food & Beverage
  • Servers 15
  • Bartenders (Chemists) 8
  • Cooks/Kitchen 15

 

• Valet: 2
  • (Educated Guess. Perhaps they valet on arrival day and drive the shuttle between Batuu on the other day)

• Housekeeping 8
  • (100 rooms, 12 rooms each = 8, again every other day)

• Merchandise: 8
  • Estimate, based on observations

• Front Desk / Guest Service 8
  • Estimate, based on observations

• Management
  • Food & Beverage 3
  • Hotel Operations 3
  • Entertainment 3

 

What do you think? Did I miscalculate anything or are my estimates way off?  Do you have any additional knowledge that you’d like to share? Anything I missed that you’d like to see?  Please let me know in the comments

I’ve been having some landscaping work done in my yard, and despite having all of the utility lines marked, the crews have managed to cut my cable internet line on several occasions. Since I work from home, and we don’t have hardly any cellular reception at the house, it was pretty devastating. I couldn’t even call the cable company to repair it without driving somewhere with better reception.

So when they said it would be a few days to get a technician to come and repair the cut cable, I decided to try out some repairs on my own. I happen to have some coax crimpers, spare cable, and ends at home, so I first attempted to terminate the cut ends, but the direct-burial cable that is used outdoors is quite a bit thicker than indoor cable, so my ends and crimpers wouldn’t work.

Without any of the correct tools, I was left with just the most primitive of methods: simply twist the center wire together with some needle nose plier, and tie them together with wire ties.

Here’s one of my first attempts when they cut the coax. I tied it into my own coax and which ran back to the house. On this first attempt, I tried to leave some extra shielding and twist that together from each end.

A subsequent cut, with newer cable had enough slack that I could just tie the two ends together directly. After it was repaired, this is what the technician left so you can see how I first twisted the ends together as much as I could with some pliers before adding a wire tie onto it. I just cut the shielding clean off and didn’t attempt to mess with it, which still resulted in it working fine.

It didn’t result in the full 200 Mbps+ speed that I should be getting, but 50+ Mbps was absolutely better than nothing for the few days until the technician could come and re-terminate the ends properly:

I was surprised that the Ubiquity Dream Machine Pro doesn’t have SNMP available. I recall that there was an option to enable it in older versions of their software, but the current 3.0.20 version doesn’t even have an option to enable it (and I don’t think that it worked correctly in previous versions).

Fortunately, its basically just a Debian machine, so you can enable it yourself! These are the steps that I took to enable snmpd so that I could add it to my network monitoring system:

First, update the respositories and install the snmp and snmpd packages:

apt update
apt install -y snmp snmpd

Then, you have to edit the snmpd.conf file in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and change these two lines from the View section. This change makes it so that instead of providing information only about the host system, it provides information about all of the attached interfaces as well.

view   systemonly  included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.1
view   systemonly  included   .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.1

To these two lines (note you remove the final .1 from the end of each).

view systemonly included .1.3.6.1.2.1
view systemonly included .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.1.1

Also, you’ll probably want to configure the snmpd deamon so that it will be available on a local network interface, so change the agentaddress line to this (obviously, with your box’s IP address if it isn’t 192.168.0.1):

agentaddress  127.0.0.1,[::1],192.168.0.1

Then restart the snmpd deamon

service snmpd restart

You can test that it is working by running snmpwalk with a command like this:

 snmpwalk -Os -c public -v 2c 192.168.0.1

Which should output hundreds of lines of stuff that start out similar to this:

brandon@auvik:~$ snmpwalk -Os -c public -v 2c 192.168.0.1
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0 = STRING: "Linux dream-machine-pro 4.19.152-ui-alpine #4.19.152 SMP Thu Apr 6 21:41:48 CST 2023 aarch64"
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.2.0 = OID: iso.3.6.1.4.1.8072.3.2.10
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.3.0 = Timeticks: (377603) 1:02:56.03
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.4.0 = STRING: "Me "
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0 = STRING: "dream-machine-pro"
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.6.0 = STRING: "mycommunity"
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.7.0 = INTEGER: 72
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.8.0 = Timeticks: (0) 0:00:00.00
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.1 = OID: iso.3.6.1.6.3.10.3.1.1
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.2 = OID: iso.3.6.1.6.3.11.3.1.1
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.3 = OID: iso.3.6.1.6.3.15.2.1.1
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.4 = OID: iso.3.6.1.6.3.1
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.5 = OID: iso.3.6.1.6.3.16.2.2.1
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.6 = OID: iso.3.6.1.2.1.49
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.7 = OID: iso.3.6.1.2.1.50
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.8 = OID: iso.3.6.1.2.1.4
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.9 = OID: iso.3.6.1.6.3.13.3.1.3
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.2.10 = OID: iso.3.6.1.2.1.92
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.3.1 = STRING: "The SNMP Management Architecture MIB."
iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.9.1.3.2 = STRING: "The MIB for Message Processing and Dispatching."

If that works, congratulations! You’ve got snmpd installed on your Ubiquity Dream Machine Pro. Your network monitoring system may take a little time for it to notice that SNMP statistics are now available on the device.

Note that upgrading the device will probably lose these configs and they’d have to be re-done.

In one of my applications, I’ve been noticing this error occurring more frequently.

PHP Warning: Packets out of order. Expected 1 received 0. Packet size=145

When investigating, I ran this long running command in the foreground and watched for a pattern. Sure enough, I found that when the program waited a long time between jobs, that the first command when it resumed would result in this error.

My application had some retry logic built-in, so that it resumed and went on as normal, so it was just an annoyance, but I don’t like it when I don’t understand how things are working.

I was able to recreate this problem reliably with this short script:

<?php
require_once 'include.php';   // Connects to the database

// Set the session wait_timeout to a small value
$db->query("SET session wait_timeout=10;");

// Prove that the connection works
$one = $db->getOne("SELECT 1");
echo "Got one = {$one}\n";

// Sleep for longer than the wait_timeout
sleep(11)

// Retry the query
$one = $db->getOne("SELECT 1");
echo "Got one = {$one}\n";

When executed, it provided this output, concluding that the wait_timeout is the problem:

got one = 1
PHP Warning:  Packets out of order. Expected 1 received 0. Packet size=145 in /path/to/myapp/db.class.php on line 68
PHP Stack trace:
PHP   1. {main}() /path/to/myapp/dbtest.php:0
PHP   2. db->getOne($sql = 'SELECT 1', $args = *uninitialized*, $recurse = *uninitialized*) /path/to/myapp/dbtest.php:13
PHP   3. PDOStatement->execute($params = []) /path/to/myapp/db.class.php:68

To prevent this problem, I implemented a timer that counts the time between queries and reconnects to the server if wait_timeout seconds elapses between queries. This may not be exact, because it counts the time between the start of the query, but it largely prevented this problem.

In my database connection class (db.class.php), it calls the conn() method for each query, so I added the timer here which causes it to disconnect when there is more than $sqlTimeout seconds between SQL queries

class db
{
    protected $lastActivityTs = null;
    static protected $sqlTimeout = 3600;  // Make sure you copy this value from your MySQL Server

    public function conn()
    {
        if (isset($this->dbh) && (microtime(true) - $this->lastActivityTs) >= self::$sqlTimeout) {
echo "Disconnecting after expired SQL connection\n";
            // Our connection is probably timed out by the server anyway
            $this->disconnect();
        }
        if (!isset($this->dbh)) {
            $this->_connect();
        }
        $this->lastActivityTs = microtime(true);
        return $this->dbh;
    }

Note that our library here automatically retries once when a connection error occurs. This has also been important to catch temporary failures and disconnects from the MySQL server and have it retry the connection.

    // Continuing in the db class
    public function getOne($sql, $args = [], $recurse = true)
    {
        try {
            $sth = $this->conn()->prepare($sql);
            $sth->execute($args);
            $sth->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_NUM);
            $row =  $sth->fetch();
            return $row[0] ?? null;
        } catch (PDOException $e) {
            if ($recurse && 'HY000' == $e->getCode()) {
                // SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2013 Lost connection to MySQL server during query
                unset($this->dbh);
                return $this->getOne($sql, $args, false);
            }
            throw $e;
        }
    }