Linux System Admins Blog

I have already mentioned that google will start penalizing your site in search if it is not fast enough. I have recently given a presentation at Drupal Con about Drupal performance and page speed. Below is a video of our session – its currently the fifth most watched session from the conference according to archive.org. [...]

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Some of us are attending the San Francisco Drupalcon 2010 this week.  I am in a session which some of you may find interesting.  The concepts are far from revelational but they are relevant. Most security breaches are done still XSS Some things to do to increase security Do not allow full HTML as input to anyone [...]

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I made a copy of Drupal6 site with SecurePages module installed and configured. This module is configured to redirect all or certain pages to https – depending on your configurations. For our setup we usually include the login and admin sections to redirect to https. The problem is on the copied site that is on [...]

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Although we made it a standard not to make any changes to Drupal core and core modules, there are times that our developers really need to make changes to core modules in order to add the required functionality. Cases like additional feature for ‘user’ or ‘comment’ modules and so on. At this state we can’t [...]

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You may know that Drupal’s developers have a saying about hacking core, its whenever you hack core, god kills a kitten. Well, whether it may or may not be true, we have learned the hard way how much can go wrong when a developer hacks core to meet some requirements and does not tell the [...]

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Absolute Path Error: cvs [checkout aborted]: absolute pathnames invalid for server (specified `/path/drupalsite/’) Ok, I got the error above when I performed Drupal CVS update on our Debian server (newly installed CVS 1.12.13). The same command works on other server with older CVS installation. The issue is the reference to local cvs directory where I [...]

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Latest version of PHP available for RHEL5.x is 5.1.6 and no new RedHat releases are coming as packaging has ceased. You can get PHP 5.3 for RHEL5 from Remi, but it it’s incompatible with latest versions of Drupal, Civicrm or many modules so we need the a 5.2X branch of PHP. This requires building php [...]

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Yesterday I received new installation request from developers to install ApacheSolr module for Drupal. Check this link for more details on Apache Solr Search Integration. Since this is new to me I spent some time on searching and doing test installations. To make it short below is my setup on our shared hosting server running [...]

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There is a module released for monitoring Drupal sites with Nagios.  Monitoring includes the check if your site is up and running, check for new updates on Drupal core, security, and modules, database updates, write permission on “files” directory,  check if cron is running on the specified period, and other sections of your Drupal site.  [...]

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This post cover the steps to copy, transfer, or duplicate a Drupal site to new domain or from development/test site to live/production server. This requires shell/command line access to the server/accounts. I attached (below) some bash/shell scripts below that i used to perform these task. Backup: In case the destination site or account have existing [...]

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