System Administration

Ironic how the world can change so quickly.  Yesterday, the CIO of my organization began enforcing the use of anti-virus software on all of our Linux clients and servers.  Today, I read that Apple is telling its Mac users to purchase anti-virus software.  Something nasty is brewing out there.

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.

This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks.  While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to ping me so much.  It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com.  But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development.  Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.

To make a long story short, I'm testing a number of ways I can use a Web content management system more efficiently to run this site.  I also want to do some restructuring of the site so that I have more flexibility in the look and feel of the site as well as how the content is delivered.  For the most part, I'll be using Pathauto, Views, Panels, and one of the aggregation modules.  I'm currently testing the FeedAPI module for aggregation, but none of the aggregation related modules really do what I want them to do.  I'll put up a site recipe in the next month or two on the modules I finally settle on to support this site.

Now it is time for me to go.  Evidently, one of the modules I've installed is causing some cron issues.  Am I having fun, yet?  Yes, I am.

Alldrupalthemes.com did a performance comparision between Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1. As the author of the post infers, the numbers collected may not mean much to the user in the "real world" and limitations in the test results should be noted. Nevertheless, numbers that compare Drupal and Joomla performance are always interesting.

The conclusions drawn from the results are:

Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.

As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.

Recently posted at XOOPS.org was a how-to for optimizing XOOPS on your server.

Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server - Sometimes, people are telling that Xoops is rather slow and it can be true but there are ways to improve things.

Instant Zero is in charge to maintain some websites using Xoops, so we decided to share with you our knowledge in this domain and we hope that you will find it useful.

In this article, and in 5 points, you are going to see what you can do for your site.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

Thanks to a post at OpenSourceCommunity.org, I came across a conversion tool to allow you to import the SMF 1.1 database into a phpBB 3 site. Information about the conversion tool can be found in a forum post at phpbb.com. By the way, the script is still in beta, meaning that it works but you might find some bugs since it is not fully tested.

Last weekend, both Linux Today and Linux.com provided links and excerpts to an article I posted here at CMS Report.  You can see some of the stats on my newly quantified site at quantcast.com.

Steven Peck, associated with the Drupal project, wrote about an article he came across regarding a comparison of the vBulletin forum and Drupal's forum. The article is titled, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. The author of the article writes:

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Mr. Peck's reaction to the article (and my emphasis in bold):

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

In other words, Peck and many of us that pay attention to how the forum applications stack up against CMS native forums don't see too many articles like this. It is rare to see someone using a standard forum application such as vBulletin, SMF, or phpBB switch over to Drupal primarily for its forum functionality.

If you are reading this post, then congratulations...you are now seeing CMS Report on its new server (a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server).  As I tweak the VPS in the following weeks, I may fall back on the old server from time to time but for the most part, I'm home.  Today officially ends my grand-experiment of running a moderately busy Drupal site on the cheap.