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PHP Programming

Drupal Needs a New Home 295

Posted by timothy from the new-slash-home-that-is dept.
reardonsteel writes "All of the Drupal websites were offline for about two days because of a server meltdown at the organization's hosting provider. The main Drupal website is back up with a single temporary page and they've announced a fund-raising drive to raise US$3000 for a new server to be hosted at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University's server farm. Drupal is the leading open-source (written in PHP) content management system and is used to power tens of thousands of websites, blogs, community sites, etc." At this point, all they need is an actual server, too: the OSL has agreed to provide rack space, bandwidth, power, backup facilities and support.
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Drupal Needs a New Home More

Drupal Needs a New Home

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  • Nice (Score:5, Funny)

    by z0ink ( 572154 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @03:40PM (#13027774)
    So now we'll go ahead and destroy the temporary server too. Good work.

  • What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 10, 2005 @03:46PM (#13027802)
    In only 12 hours, they have already raised nearly 2000 dollars for the new server, PRIOR to the posting on slashdot. People who care change the world for the BETTER, while those who don't impact it terribly.

  • Oh that's good... (Score:4, Funny)

    by noneloud ( 891263 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @03:55PM (#13027849)
    They have a server meltdown, so Slashdot gives them another?

    tim, I think you should watch your (real life) Karma...That's not very nice :)

  • Renting a dedicated box? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moz25 ( 262020 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @03:55PM (#13027852) Homepage
    What I don't get is why they aren't renting their own dedicated box, so they don't have to own the hardware. You can get a dual Xeon configuration for about $200-300/month and with about 2TB of bandwidth. Of course now they won't have a monthly bill, but every time they need to upgrade the machine or repair it, there are going to be costs.
    • Because $200-300/month is a lot for a FOSS project just starting to figure out how to make enough money to cover their costs. I'm sure hosting costs are coming out of their pockets right now.

    • Well, I offered it to them... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SlashChick ( 544252 ) * <erica@noSpam.erica.biz> on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:08PM (#13027912) Homepage Journal
      I offered them a free Dual Xeon 2.8GHz server, 1GB RAM, 1x80GB hard drive with 500GB transfer a month, hosted at Simpli [simpli.biz] (my hosting company). We host several Drupal sites and I'd be happy to have them on board. I asked for a text link back to Simpli. I haven't heard back from them, so I guess they'd rather beg their users for money than take a free dedicated server. I have to say I'm a bit disappointed, but it's their money and their choice.

      • yes well, where were you last month? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yes and where were you before the actual problem? This was already in the works for the last few weeks.

        It is better to OWN your core resources and leverage the other stuff that OSL is offering. They also provide mirroring, 24x7 admin staff familier with and specializing in open source software.

        OSL does NOT REQUIRE an AD for this service. IT's just what they do. What happends when Drupal goes beyond 500GB/month? All this for the price of owning a server. I own my server and you seem to own yours.

        For

      • Re:Well, I offered it to them... (Score:5, Informative)

        by factoryjoe ( 838642 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @10:59PM (#13030048) Homepage
        SlashChick, just wanted to say that we appreciate your offer and wouldn't mind discussing some kind of backup mirroring situation with you.

        The reason why your offer was treated as such was not because we don't appreciate it -- indeed we've had a few offers and we're fortunate to receive them!

        As one of the proponents of this project (which I suggested more than a month ago but only became serious about around the middle of June) I know that there were a number of possibilities that we considered before deciding to go with OSL.

        In particular, I've maintained an excellent relationship with Scott Kveton over there during my time at Spread Firefox. He was an excellent resource and advocate during that time and in fact offered to host Drupal.org sometime back in February when I mentioned the idea to him.

        As part of the arrangement, we needed to purchase the hardware on which drupal.org would live. The $3000 target was set by the following recommended specs, supplied by Scott:

        Dell PowerEdge 1850 1U
        2 x 2.8Ghz Xeon w/ 1Mb cache 800Mhz FSB
        2GB RAM
        2 x 73 GB SCSI disks
        RAID controller for RAID1 (mirror)
        Redundant Power Supply

        From there, Dries (Drupal's founder), Steven Peck, Kieran Lal (of CivicSpace) and myself collaborated on a fundraising strategy, with Dries and Steven writing up the description that ended up on Drupal.org.

        Ironically, or perhaps just as one could have predicted, drupal.org went black for two days just as we were finalizing the copy. With drupal.org down, I presume Dries moved the DNS to another host and posted the text we had.

        13 hours later we more than doubled our goal thanks to the collective economic power of the open source community!

        So in sum, SlashChick, we do really appreciate your offer, but we had already staked out a plan a month ago and drupal.org's going black was simply an oddly timed incident that spurred the community to action! Feel free to get in touch with me to discuss your offer further if you'd like.

    • Re:Renting a dedicated box? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by suwain_2 ( 260792 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:50PM (#13028146) Journal
      A few reasons I can think of off-hand:
      * Renting higher-end servers gets awfully expensive
      * Adding another hard drive might cost you something like $20/month forever -- if you plan on being around for a long time, it's actaully much cheaper to just buy
      * I've read a few horror stories of people whose dedicated server providers (some at fairly reputable places) had their servers formatted by mistake. With a colocated server, you don't have to worry about a tech transposing a couple digits in your IP and formatting the wrong machine.
      • Well, I've had experience both with co-located boxes and with dedicated (rented) boxes. The reason I migrated to rented boxes was because when a co-located box fails, you have to go down there personally and fix things. Migration to another provider is also a lot more cumbersome (you have to pick up your box, during which time you'll be offline) and generally, you're still paying for the bandwidth. In their case, they have the fortunate (but unusual) situation of not having to pay for co-location.

        I don't f
    • They're being offered free colo and bandwidth. If they were to rent that for $300/month, they'd have spent $3000 in 10 months (or 15 months, if they're paying $200/month.) That's not very long - it's much better financially to buy the hardware and take the free monthly. Also, it's probably much easier to raise funds for a one-time item like this than to beg for rent money every month.

  • A good candidate for P2P? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @03:57PM (#13027858)
    Last month, drupal.org alone served more than 3 million pages for 100 Gb of traffic (this does not include any of the other sites or services; non Drupal websites, Drupal mailing list traffic, etc).

    Once they have a new box, why don't they distribute their software and docs up on P2P? surely that'll lighten the network load and cost them less.

    • Not really... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Phil John ( 576633 )
      ...seeing as the main drupal tarball is only ~450k.

  • All Together Now... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:00PM (#13027875)
    So what?

    Seriously, I have never heard of Drupal until I saw this article. It may be useful software, very useful, but who knows? FA like this should really start off like this:
    "Drupal, the leading PHP blog server provider, has problems..."

    Then maybe /.ers can figure out what the hell you're talking about. Your pet tech doesn't mean everybody else immediately knows what you're talking about.
    • "Seriously, I have never heard of Drupal until I saw this article. It may be useful software, very useful, but who knows?"
      This is Slashdot not CNN. It is assumed that if you do not know what a program is you would do a Google on it or at least click the link.

  • Drupal powers... (Score:5, Informative)

    by UnConeD ( 576155 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:00PM (#13027877)

    To answer the question, what is Drupal...

    Drupal is the open-source CMS behind:

    and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.

  • What is the security of Drupal like? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:02PM (#13027885)
    Today I was reading an entry [slashdot.org] in Eugenia Loli-Queru's [slashdot.org] Slashdot journal. It was discussing the recent defacing of TuxTops.com.

    Now, looking at the source code to the main page of TuxTops.com I noticed that it includes a CSS file "misc/drupal.css". That would lead me to believe that they are using Drupal as their content management system. Please verify this for yourself if you do not believe me.

    My question is: why was their site defaced so easily? Was it because Drupal itself is an inherently insecure system? Or was it just improperly installed?

    Can anybody shed some light on this? I would like to use it, but seeing stuff like that makes me nervous.

    • ...such as they could be using AWStats which recently provided a possible attack vector. They could have any other unsecure scripts running (phpbb et al). If they are on a shared host that hasn't locked down the environment (according to reverse DNS there's 4 sites on their machine).

      Or it may have been drupal, who knows.

      From what I've seen Drupal is one of the better written PHP blog/cms/portals out there (John Lim, author of PHP ADODB also seems to think so, pointing out several things like how damn sm

    • Security is excellent. However, a recent exploit in a popular open source xml-rpc module that is also used by many other program other than Drupal was recently reported to have a security hole. The Drupal project quickly released a patch to fix this problem last week. Sites that have not applied this patch are vulnerable.

    • Re:What is the security of Drupal like? (Score:5, Informative)

      by stevey ( 64018 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:51PM (#13028155) Homepage

      It could well have been the recently revealed XML-RPC exploit [slashdot.org] which Drupal appears to have been vulnerable to.

      Debian released an updated Drupal security package [debian.org] today. I'm sure other distributions have also done so, or are about to.

  • Server meltdown? Oh let's /. them now that they are back online.
  • I just finished a project using drupal. I found it pretty solid CMS. The code is clean and relatively easy to manage.

  • Already hit fundraising target! (Score:4, Informative)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:18PM (#13027968) Homepage Journal
    From the single page, it says:

    Fundraise status

    Start date:
    13 hours 5 min ago

    Received:
    $6468 USD

    Target:
    $3000 USD

    Last updated:
    2 min 56 sec ago

    MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

  • Drupal rocks (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nysus ( 162232 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:22PM (#13027989)
    As a minor contributor to the Drupal project, I can tell you it rocks. It's a very well written piece of code. Much more than a CMS, it's a platform on which communities can be launched and mini applications can be written. I believe that Drupal could help revolutionize web site development for inidividuals, small non-profits, and small businesses. It's an extremely flexible and powerful platform. What's more, the main developers of Drupal are pure to the free software philosophy.

    When the site comes back up, you should check it out.

  • Drupal got 11 Google "Summer of Code" developers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nysus ( 162232 ) on Sunday July 10, 2005 @04:51PM (#13028159)
    To the naysayers out there, you should know that Drupal got 11 "Summer of Code" developers. Do the folks at Google obviously think very highly of this open source project.
    • I highly doubt that being a part of the Summer of Code means Google is spooging over the project.

      Both FreeBSD and NetBSD got projects, both GNOME and KDE got projects, both Ubuntu and Fedora Core got projects and both Perl and Python got projects. Each of those pairing are opposing projects, they just had interesting ideas that someone at Google liked.

      So, I hardly see this as Google being infatuated with Drupal, more likely Drupal got a few proposals that interested the team that had to select from the

      • Did I ever use the word "infatuated"?

        You don't think being among the 40 from over 8,000 ideas doesn't give the project some kind credibility?

        Me thinks you have some kind of axe to grind. Sorry.
        • You said that they think very highly of a CMS, I said you're wrong. Where, pray tell, is my ax I am supposedly in need of honing?

          You make it seem as though Google cares for this project in some manner, I pointed out that they obviously aren't taking favourites here. This was that the people that wanted to work on Drupal projects came up with ideas that people at Google thought interesting.

          If you want to call an apple an orange you're not going to have me agreeing with you, cause they're not the same.


  • Have you tried eBay? GoodWill?

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