Drupal lab

I am running some Drupal based websites. I had to spent much of time for backup my websites daily/weekly. After i moved the websites to VPS and Dreamhost, i have ssh access so i wrote a small script to backup websites databases and user uploaded file to Amazon S3 automatically. The script is executed via cron tab daily. 

Apache Solr is a great full text search solution, i have set up it for some drupal based sites of mine. Everything works ok except it could not return return unicode query correctly. I have googled this prob for Drupal and Apache Solr integration but nobody asked before.

Finally, I talked a Java guru. He tell me about problem for Tomcat/Solr. There is no error at Drupal instance. I tried to fix this by googling about Solr unicode encoding. I fugured out by following configuration.

Adding URIEncoding="UTF-8" to server.xml of Tomcat config file. It should look like:

Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor. (Excerpted from Quercus)

Google App Engine (GAE) is a cloud platform for hosting web applications. It does not like traditional web hosting, your web applications will run on Google Web Servers and you don't have to take care about server maintainance, administration. Google guys do it for you. It is launched April 2008 as free service but there are many limits and bugs in their plarform and API. They just have enabled billing for that service and will support more features.

Google App Engine overview

AutoMySQLBackup is a great script that help us backup MySQL databases automatically. It can run thru cron job in or manually. It is easy to setup and make it works. I have just get it works only 5 minutes. The script uses mysqldump to backup MySQL databases so make sure you have it at your linux server/vps.

It is an open source/freeware so you are free to place it at your server/vps to backup your MySQL databases daily, weekly, monthy or manually.

AutoMySQLBackup features

 If you have some MySQL database files that bigger than 100MB, it is difficult to upload and import via phpmyadmin. Please use bigdump at http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.zip it is the best tool to import big database files.

ChoiCungBe.com is a childcare website that is developed in Drupal 6 and some contributed modules. The site is using Acquia Marina Theme, one of the best free drupal theme. Some modules that are using at http://choicungbe.com are modified to match site owner's requirement. It is online but is still developing to support more features as multi-user blogging, personal gallery and some other social network features.

Postfix is a free open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA. Formerly known as VMailer and IBM Secure Mailer, it was originally written by Wietse Venema during a stay at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and continues to be actively developed today. Postfix was first released in mid-1999.

Download MySQL Source Code from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/

shell> groupadd mysql
shell> useradd -g mysql mysql
shell> gunzip < mysql-VERSION.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
shell> cd mysql-VERSION
shell> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql
shell> make
shell> make install
shell> cp support-files/my-medium.cnf /etc/my.cnf
shell> cd /usr/local/mysql
shell> chown -R mysql .
shell> chgrp -R mysql .
shell> bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
shell> chown -R root .
shell> chown -R mysql var
shell> bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql &

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yum install ncurses-devel
yum install gcc gcc-c++

Web hosting is a most important problem after domain. The website will lose visitors if it is hosted by a bad hosting provider. There are many reason that effected to visitors of the website. This article will go into detail of hosting problems.