Apache

Have you been trying to index your node to Apache immediately after its been created, updated or deleted! Read On!! By default Apache Solr uses a queue system to index data to Solr. We can preconfigure the interval in which the indexing should perform. Still, there occurs a delay for the node to get indexed.

Let's check how to add password protection to directories, there are many ways to add password protection to a directory. Here lets see how doing this with .htaccess. It is the built-in feature in Apache using htaccess method. By doing this we could restrict access to certain users or search engines.

The Apache Solr module integrates Drupal with the Apache Solr search platform. Solr search can be used as a replacement for core content search and boasts both extra features and better performance. The apachesolr module requires the external PHP library,"SolrPhpClient". If this is missing in your apachesolr module directory, it will show the following fatal error after installing or updating this module.

One of the challenges with working with dynamic websites is that you have to keep fighting malicious users who regularly sap your server capacity with rogue crawling of your site. To do this you would have to monitor and analyze the traffic patterns on the server regularly. You would definitely want to do this when you have load spikes on the server and you wish to find out the IP addresses, user agents and the specific URLs which resulted in these spikes.

On one of our recent projects we had an issue where the Drupal site search was not working. There was a search.html file present in the home folder to handle a Google custom search page outside of Drupal. Since the filename was not the same as the drupal search path we did not expect it to be the cause for the Drupal search to not work.

As announced earlier Zyxware conducted a 2 hour training session on Introduction to Drupal at the MES Advanced Institute of Management and Technology on the 26th of Sep, 2013.

APC or Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. APC allows for caching of opcode generated during PHP script parsing and execution by the Zend engine. If you are using APC 3.1.9 and you are using the default configuration you might run into the error where most PHP requests will return a warning message "PHP Warning: Unknown: Unable to allocate memory for pool. in Unknown on line 0"

If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.

One of our clients sent us images they want to put in the website as pdf files. There were 100 files each containing a single image. Opening each of these in gimp and then saving it as pngs was a nightmare. For all such situations, ImageMagick is there for your rescue. With mogrify - a command utility available in the ImageMagick package, bulk converting all these pdf files to png was child's play.

We had recently been involved in a project to set up a Conference Management System for an International Conference to be conducted in Kerala sometime later this year. We had zeroed in on Pentabarf as the solution we were going to base the system on. Pentabarf is a Ruby on Rails solution that has been used for the last couple of DebConfs. Pentabarf as such is an excellent system, being a system created by programmers for programmers, but it heavily lacked in documentation both on their site and on the world wide web. We however managed to get it installed on Ubuntu with Apache, Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. We are sharing the installation instructions for Pentabarf on Ubuntu here

Most of the web based systems that we build at Zyxware uses Drupal as the content framework. The following are the steps involved in setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL and Drupal on a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.04 system. If you follow the instructions you should be able to set it up as is but if you face problems let us know and we will try to help you.

Most webmasters do not realize this, but a lot of the content on lot of websites can be accessed from multiple URLs. A simple example would be where www.example.com and example.com leads to the same page. This is a fatal mistake in Search Engine Optimization and search engines penalize you for duplicate content. The correct configuration would be where the above two urls will lead you to the same page but example.com will redirect you to www.example.com with a 301 (Moved permanently) status which will not result in search engines penalizing the page. It is very easy to configure 301 redirects using Apache .htaccess file and the process is the same for a Drupal installation also.