Week 061 — Grafana Working on Multiple Machines

  • devops
  • debugging

Grafana is working. A session bug surfaces that only breaks on one machine.

Week of January 19, 2026

Progress

Grafana was successfully brought up on a second machine without additional configuration. The observability stack is now working consistently across dev environments.

A session error on macbaby turned out to be <!DOCTYPE html> appearing before session_start() in index.php. PHP requires no output before session_start() — any output, including HTML doctype declarations, triggers a headers-already-sent error that prevents the session from being set. Interestingly, this was only breaking on macbaby; the same code worked fine on the other development machine. The difference in behavior isn't fully understood. The fix was to remove the premature DOCTYPE.

Next Week

Lost item saving refactor.