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Drupal Needs a New Home 295
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.
Nice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nice (Score:5, Informative)
Many computers cost $3000 and up. I've seen rackmount machines from HP, Dell and Sun all cost way more than $3000.
Mostly it depends on what their uses are. If they are just using it to host their website they probably don't need much of a server, if they are using that server as a development/test platform as well I'm sure it would be helpful to have a somewhat bigger machine. Actually, from their site:
Currently, drupal.org runs on a shared server paid for and maintained by Kjartan. The server is a single Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM. There are about 20 sites running on the server, including some of our sites like http://drupal.org/ [drupal.org], http://drupaldocs.org/ [drupaldocs.org] and http://cvs.drupal.org/ [drupal.org]. In addition to the websites, the server hosts our mailing lists, mailing list archives and CVS repositories. 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).
Where I work we run HP DL380 machines, which is not really a high end server. Base price on those is $2899. In a perfect world, that would be about the class of server I would want to run a site like Drupal has.
What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:2)
Re:What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:2)
While it has its annoyances it is probably one of the best CMS I have seen and certainly the easiest to setup and maintain.
I just donated 20 Euros ($24 and change USD) to the project.
Re:What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:2)
Tyan GX28 1u rackmount... plus a couple reasonable Opteron 242 CPU's... and 2GB of RAM... and some pair of modest hard drives (SATA)... and they have a system for $2500 that is well built and 64bit.
Re:new hardware.. (Score:2)
tm
Oh that's good... (Score:4, Funny)
tim, I think you should watch your (real life) Karma...That's not very nice
Renting a dedicated box? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Renting a dedicated box? (Score:2)
Well, I offered it to them... (Score:5, Interesting)
yes well, where were you last month? (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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:Well, I offered it to them... (Score:2)
I talked directly to Dries last night on freenode, way before this hit Slashdot.
Re:Renting a dedicated box? (Score:4, Insightful)
* 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.
Re:Renting a dedicated box? (Score:2)
I don't f
10-15 month payback? Buy, don't rent (Score:2)
Re:Renting a dedicated box? NOT (Score:2)
I don't know where drupal is hosting, but 100GB is not that much bandwidth if you're hosting in the U.S.
A good candidate for P2P? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:A good candidate for P2P? (Score:2)
For big tarballs and things like that, they could just maintain torrents up for whatever file they want to distribute. When they make a new release, they post the torrent, first seed it, then let other BT clients help distribute it. The worst that can happen is that they maintain torrents to older releases that next to nobody downloads anymore, and they're the only seed for them, and they're not worse off than having t
All Together Now... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:
Then maybe
Re:All Together Now... (Score:2, Offtopic)
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)
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.
Re:Drupal powers... (Score:2)
CivicSpace is a distribution (Score:5, Informative)
What is the security of Drupal like? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It could have been a multitude of things... (Score:2)
...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
Re:What is the security of Drupal like? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is the security of Drupal like? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Funny)
Drupal is pretty good (Score:2)
Already hit fundraising target! (Score:4, Informative)
Fundraise status
Start date:
13 hours 5 min ago
Received:
$6468 USD
Target:
$3000 USD
Last updated:
2 min 56 sec ago
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Re:Already hit fundraising target! (Score:2)
Re:Already hit fundraising target! (Score:2)
+++
My new Home [stevenpatz.net]
Drupal rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
When the site comes back up, you should check it out.
Drupal got 11 Google "Summer of Code" developers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Drupal got 11 Google "Summer of Code" developer (Score:2)
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
Re:Drupal got 11 Google "Summer of Code" developer (Score:2)
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.
Re:Drupal got 11 Google "Summer of Code" developer (Score:2)
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.
Smartass Remark (Score:2)
Have you tried eBay? GoodWill?
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:2)
Never heard of them though, and I still don't know what it means either
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't know anything about the software I listed above, just google them!
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:5, Insightful)
Newer stuff such as Drupal, Mambo (which I personally dislike), Textpattern, and other newer CMS systems have embraced emerging web technologies (Ajax, CSS) and are generally written with extremely clean code and have very simplistic ways of operating (mac-like if you would care to make the analogy)
Slash and nuke are dinosaurs. They may still work fine, but if you're going to make a new site, you'd do yourself a favor to research the newer options. Development on all of the 'old' CMSes has stalled, and little work is being done to improve them.
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:3, Informative)
The first several google links all appear to point to the site that is down. Even the cached links I read didn't get to the part that actually described what it was. Hope that helps.
Kirby
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:2)
BTW, archive.org pulls it up fine
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:2)
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:2)
Re:What was drupal? (Score:3, Informative)
It needs your money.
What was its place
drupal.org
and its goals?
Collect $3000.
Re:What was drupal? (Score:2)
Re:What was drupal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Parent? Meet Google [google.com]. I know it's hard to believe, but this is a site that catalogs the entire internet and allows you to search through them for the information you seek. For example, if
Re:What was drupal? (Score:2)
Its pretty simple.
Why should i have to search for 'more info' when they are asking for donations? A responsible 'news service' would happen to explain what the hell the subject was about. Other than just a blurb 'we are drupal and we want your money'.
Get off your high horse, idiot. Who the hell do you think YOU are? Not someone with some sense, obviously.
Re:What was drupal? (Score:2)
If you don't know about it, then it's not you they are asking for money. I was ready to get out my credit card and make a donation, then I found they already have what they need. They got the donations so quickly (in less than 12 hours, it seems) because there are more than enough people who use, depend on and value the software.
Re:What was drupal? (Score:2)
Re:What was drupal? (Score:2)
Re:What was drupal? (Score:2)
Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW I find the lectures about what you think customers want somewhat annoying. Customers care about having their own systems up and run
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
There are other reasons why an MS outage, though "unacceptable", is accepted, while Drupal's is not. Because MS is an monopoly, their downtime weighs against the lack of alterna
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Drupal is a software package. No customers are down as a result. I can certainly admit that Drupal fucked up. With those traffic numbers I would have moved to my own set of boxes awhile ago.
"I find that you've completely discredited yourself in your apology for Drupal's inadequacy in serving their customers. Customers want reliability - it's one reason we switch to Linux from Microsoft w
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
As for my credibility, after 15 years programming, 5 years professionally, I launched a multinational consultancy in Toronto and NYC. We built websites and backend/intranet infosystems for banks, publishing companies, cable companies, and other big businesses. Like NorTel, DeutscheBank, PrenticeHall, the Federal government of Canada, and others with billion dollar organizations depending to some degree on the product
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Further, you've given me an opportunity to commend Drupal, and the OSS community of which we're all members. A traditional corporation that went through a catastrophe like this probably wouldn't survive. Because all it would have to rely on would be its revenues, which would dry up after such an outage (especially if they hadn't reserved enough to redeploy). And investment, which would be an even worse outlook. But Drupal could naturally request help from its users, who ha
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
There's a reason businesses prefer to do business with businesses, rather than hobbyist "projects". Reliability, discipline. When a business has a problem like Drupal's outage, it responds, t
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
But the point is that it isn't a product for sale, and they do not have or even need a "customer" relationship. It is given away for free by volunteers, and they aren't required to donate their money too, just because th
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
"You are a hobbyist - open source doesn't have to be anything to you, except open, and source."
"Or it's suitable only for hobbyists, and people like you who are scared of success in the market."
Nice ad hominem attacks. As far this goes, its a minor affair, in fact I would use it
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
"You don't work in marketing, by any chance?"
You created this market for ad hominem attacks, so you can't have it both ways. Try to pretend that the first attack is on my "twisting", and not an insult to "people like [me]". Or that the marketing remark isn't a personal attack, on a marketdroid. Pretty sleazy rhetorical strategy, and I don't buy it.
On the point worth discussing, you point out that the company's handling growing pains indicates its quality. D
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
BTW Ignore the AC trolls m
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Nah, I eat AC trolls for breakfast. I don't care about getting mud on me when wrestling with a pig: the loophole in the old adage about
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
I also expect people to do capacity planning and notice th
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
I agree. I also think that their sector distribution is related to exactly the kinds of risks we've been talking about. When they grow up enough that a burnt hosted server isn't even noticeable, due to failover planning, they'll expand their corporate base. With such a
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:2)
Not "rediculous" (Score:3, Informative)
I think that Drupal wants something more than a toy. A box full of a bunch of no-name, el-cheapo hardware isn't really going to cut it. $3K for a low to mid level, brand name server with some guts to it and a real warranty is a fair price.
-h-
Re:Not "rediculous" (Score:2)
well that 1600 includes an intel mobo, and a hardware raid setup, as well as 3 years of warranty.
wouldn't call that el-cheapo. For "el-cheapo" I could get well over 4 1U rackmount servers for 3000$.
$3k for a basic rackmount box or hosting? Uh, no. (Score:2)
No, it's really not a fair price. $2k will get you a 1U (assuming you pay by space, which is common at colos), 3Ghz P4, 2GB, 2x80GB SATA w/RAID controller, from Dell. Including 3 years of next-day on-site service. That's a pretty damn nice box; maybe you'd like to trade in 1GB of that RAM for a pair of 120's or 200's, but you get the idea. If that's not enough horsepower for an installation of drupa
Re:Your 2 cents have no value. (Score:2)
yup I'm a non-native english speaker, but I can order decent hardware with decent support for less. Take off the "dell" label and get Tyan components or 3ware, and you get the same HW warranty as dell, for at least a thousand dollars less.
Waste your money on Dell and HP, sure you get 3 years of support, but in the 3rd year you wish you had gotten something cheaper and replaced the harware already, instead of calling HP/Dell support over and over because some component has become unreliable.
Re:3000??? rediculous (Score:2)
Even 2 year old dell servers will make you worry. I've got one with a SCSI disc that is starting to give bad sectors. 3 years is a _very_ long time especially for always-on hardware. You're better of replacing it after 2 then fixing it after 3 years.
THE ANSWER...Re:How does it compare to Mambo? (Score:2, Informative)
OT, but I can't help myself... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can meet many former 'homosexuals'; you will never meet a former 'African-American'."
Are they trying to say that I'll never meet Michael Jackson?
Burn, Karma, Burn...
Re:.....wtf (Score:2)
- separate content and code
- portability (apply a different presentation, and you can have xml output, html, wml, plain text, pdf, doc, ps, etc. etc)
- management (most content contributors don't know anything about html. Only the content.
IMHO above comment is a troll.
Re:.....wtf (Score:2)
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe there was some misunderstanding you could clear up?
Re:.....wtf (Score:2)
Go troll somewhere, please.
Re:.....wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. I used to write all of the code for my own website. It probably took me about a week of full-time-equivalent work, and it worked OK, but that's still a far cry from half an hour. Don't give me any of that crap about it being because you're a better programmer, either. I work on kernels and distributed systems for a living, and have done for over a decade. Web programming is something I do as a break from real work because it's so easy by comparison. Nonetheless, all you can get in half an hour is something that sucks. If you want something that's modular and maintainable, that takes more time. If you want something that's database-efficient, that takes more time...and flat-file-based systems are even worse so don't go there. If you want something that's standards-compliant, that takes more time...and your main page generated 130 errors when I ran it through the W3C validator. If you want it not to look like crap (again unlike your site) that takes more time. If you want to have features like markup in comments and comment preview, decent archive management, categories, and search (again unlike...) that takes more time. If you want to do all of those things and have it be secure, that takes more time; not knowing how to implement features securely is a poor excuse for having a low-functionality site. Do all that in under the week it took me, and I'll be impressed. So far, not even close.
My guess, based on your comment, is that you're another victim of the rewrite bug that often afflicts junior programmers. Writing code is not necessarily more efficient than reading other people's, but it is generally more fun so kiddies always want to rewrite everything in sight. What they end up with isn't usually any better, though. Most code that's written as an excuse not to understand something that already existed sucks far worse than what it replaces. That's why most of the people who roll their own website never even have the balls to make the result available for others to see. They know that it's a lot easier to claim superiority than to prove it.
That's the most offensive thing about your post, and why I went out of my way to be offensive right back. Sure, maybe you and I can (with varying degrees of success) write code to do the things that a typical weblog does, but why should we be the only ones to have sites? Why shouldn't high-school students and grandmothers have them too? Sure, most of what they write is crap, but so is most of what geeks write (including here). What purpose is served by having someone who might be able to contribute code in some other domain that you know nothing about have to learn your most treasured skills as the price of entry to the world of website ownership? What if their contribution is something other than code - like scientific knowledge or political insight? Aren't those valuable too? Thinking that everyone should value what you value is beyond elitist, and contrary to the spirit of free enterprise. It's just a crutch for insecurity, not a valid or useful attitude. It's almost as pathetic as posting fake-IQ-test results to your blog.
Re:.....wtf (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it turns out, you're right. I went to his site and thought, "hmm, a blog system with comments and trackbacks, maybe he does have a point if he built this whole thing in 30 minutes." But then I tried his system. Anyone can add comments -- comment spam could (and probably eventually will) overrun his system. In addition, I was able to easily drop JavaScript code into the comments and it was executed! Of course, I only dropped in a harmless JavaScript alert, as I don't want to get in trouble for "hacking" a neophyte's crappy blog system.
But in any case, to the grandparent post: my God, man, you cannot build such a shoddy, terrible system, and then tout the benefits of reinventing the wheel. Your wheel is awful, and better people before you have built wheels that put yours to shame. Yours is bad enough to actually be dangerous. It's a black-hat's wet dream. SQL injection, code insertion, you don't even launder your input! I fear for your site and the server that hosts it.
Re:Leading CMS ? Came on! (Score:2)
http://www.sitellite.org/ [sitellite.org]
Disclaimer: My sig links to the company that supports Sitellite and funds its main developers (incl. me).