Attempting to install Fedora 20 on an older i7 system recently produced a series of failures. For starters, after the installation allegedly completed, the system would hang after the BIOS screens at the point where the OS should start. That’s because Anaconda installed no bootloader. A computer isn’t very useful with no operating system. To […]
If you have a multi-site Drupal 7 install, or simply another database living alongside your Drupal database, sometimes you may want to pull a few records from the other database for display on your Drupal site. Displaying data from the Drupal database is pretty easy since you can just use Drupal’s built-in db_query function: (If […]
This notifies users by email (sendmail) when a particular file changes on a Unix-style filesystem. This was originally written for a page that was being modified by multiple people in the wiki software shipped with Apple’s OS X Server. This worked all right as a hack, but if you need extensive content management or granular […]
Using Varnish and Pound together is a relatively easy way to ensure the Varnish cache works for both SSL and non-SSL web sites. Varnish is a general-purpose web cache that can make your web sites and applications run substantially faster for your visitors while reducing the overall load on your web server. It works by […]
By default most Apache web servers — at least prior to Apache 2.4 — run Apache’s Prefork MPM (multi-processing module). Prefork works OK and offers the greatest compatibility with existing Apache modules, but it consumes a relatively large amount of memory because it spawns many processes that each handle one connection at a time. Prefork […]
A simple bash script to back up MySQL databases. This backs up every database on the server to individual gzipped files in the directory you specify so that you can easily restore them separately. If you want it to run everyday, save it with an .sh extension and add it to the crontab of an […]
These are some notes on Drupal installation and performance on Unix-like operating systems (using Ubuntu here). Drupal Installation Install MySQL and create the database and Drupal database user first. If you must use apt or yum to install Drupal, don’t try to install everything at once. If you can avoid it, don’t install Drupal from […]
I was seeing a couple of errors in the Drupal Webform module, and this page describes the fixes I used to eliminate them. This applies to version 3.x so if you’ve upgraded to 4 I doubt this is relevant anymore. As described at http://drupal.org/node/1462986. To fix this I found #webform_component in the theme_webform_display_select() function in […]
This page describes an OTRS migration from one Linux server to another. The background: I had an existing version 3.1.x installation of the OTRS Help Desk system that needed to be upgraded to the latest version (at the time, 3.2.9) and migrated from an Ubuntu 12.04 system to a CentOS 6.1 system. The goal was […]
An updated version of this article using OTRS 5 and Ubuntu 16.04 is available here. This article describes how to install the OTRS help desk system on an Ubuntu 12.04 server. OTRS is a popular open-source help desk system written in Perl; it was at version 3.2.9 as of this writing. The instructions here should […]