CustomerCentrix

After getting IP address, user name and password for our new server, the next step is to update a few things.

• License: You get an initial message the you license is expired (or missing). Under Server - License Management, click the Retrieve Keys link to update the license automatically. You have to this regularly (every 45 days or so), and occasionally it is unavailable and you have to try again later.
• Updater: Also under the Server node, this seems a good thing to do right away so that you are starting with the most recent version. I originally thought that frequent updates were wise until one of them broke many of our apps because of a php configuration issue. Now I am more selective. It also makes sense to not install anything that you do not anticipate using, since some may add overhead and all will take up some space.
  

As is unfortunately typical, ordering and paying for products is often much easier than using it after you have paid. We ordered another dedicated server from 1 and 1, but cannot use it yet. I gave up after half hour on hold yesterday listening to musak. Although much of that is now 80s tunes, now called oldies, I didn't want to spend my afternoon in the office. So, now on Monday morning I am waiting again.

It isn't like I am just trying to get a stupid question answered like "what is a web server?" From the server is ready email:

To gain full access, you must first contact our Support team on 1-877-435-7281 and request access.

We have done a number of installations, but not really standardized as we probably should on needed settings and modules. I think that Drupal would be a better product, or maybe just more appealing to businesses, if it had a different set of defaults and simpler process for getting started. So, here is an attempt to define the basics for a simple business web site starting with Drupal version 4.6.3.

• Assumed prerequisites - see also Drupal Installation - domain created, web server configured, files copied, database created with new tables, Drupal configured in settings.php (/sites/default/) and finally initial user created (admin)

For those who are looking for low cost web hosting, we currently use:

for some of our dedicated servers. We are an affiliate, so we would appreciate your clicking on the above image to sign up if you have the need. They provide shared hosting for very low cost as well as both Windows and Linux servers. Also, we currently use Webintellects and Data393 for higher-end multiprocessor servers. Some that we have used and moved on from for various reasons are:

One of our customers is doing work with Flash for training and has on their wish list an implementation of the Flash Communication Server. This is a server product for streaming live or recorded media. I would guess that there is a good bit of overlapping technology with this product and Breeze, although Breeze is more of an end-user server product very similar to WebEx and other online meeting tools. The FCS is for deploying content that is created by developers using Flash MX or other Macromedia tools. There are a number of components included that can be cobbled together into applications (either web apps or standalone ones).

Since I can never recall the names of these, I decided to post a few links here. The main contenders seem to be osCommerce along with a couple of projects that were spawned from the osCommerce code. A review of these is located here. The initial choice was easy because osCommerce is available as an instantly installed application by many hosting companies. But, it doesn't seem like the osCommerce code has been updated in a couple of years, so a change to one of the newer ones might be in order at some point. The other choices are:

I always liked this quote from Brian Moore:

Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo. Damned cool voodoo, but still voodoo.

I wonder if he is known for anything other than this quote?

I have had the pleasure of stumbling around rewrite rules several times, and once again read through about 30 examples that were all more complicated than I needed. I am at the stage in learning this where it seems easy enough but didn't work as expected. All that I wanted to do was to redirect the home page url / to a subdirectory /store/. No wild cards needed, nothing fancy, just direct a single url to another place. The problem was with the way that a redirect may interact with other apache directives in other files. I was doing this in the root directory .htaccess file and had looked at the httpd.conf file before but not lately. Apparently, the default page choices will override a redirect, so what seems obvious:

No doubt there are Plenty of Choice in Open-Source CMS as described in this article on eWeek. We have chosen Drupal for our web site (not truly a CMS as we are using it) which gets a mention near the end of the article. I am not sure that I agree with the assessment that the top issues in choosing a system are:

Usability
DBMS

Usability is certainly critical, but seems to me secondary to fitting the needs of the users. With such a huge number of applications to choose from, narrowing the options is key. Features and platform are relatively quick and easy ways to do that. Usability is another, but is irrelevant if the features and platform are not appropriate. Usability is also much more difficult to assess.

Here are a few notes about Drupal installation because I need a checklist for this sort of thing, and it might be useful for others who need to install Drupal. Before messing with Drupal, the domain name needs to be set up, a site created with directory space and mysql database created. The install.txt doc contained with the Drupal download covers most of this, so the main idea here is to just list the items and provide a few details about what is not covered there.

1. Copy Drupal files to web site.
2. Create the database

Sometimes when I sit back and think about programming and what we nerds use for names, I just have to laugh. I am currently referring to a book where I realized that a problem is caused by the fact that a cookie value cannot contain whitespace. So, the answer is to escape the cookie value and then unescape it later as needed.

Cookies, Java, Virus, Worm, Trojan, Apple, Bug

What happened to the good old days of acronyms: IBM, BASIC and such ;-) I guess that bug goes back a long way and was not even a metaphor at the time it was first used but literally an insect in the computer hardware.