It's been a while since I last checked out Drupal 7, but now that the beta is out (old news) I've taken another look and I was absolutely amazed at everything they've done with it. It's come so far in the last year. I love the new admin overlay and the new theme is almost beautiful enough to keep enabled. It seems like a few staple modules for Drupal 6 have been made obsolete, the default install profile has a lot of useful features included.

With that all being said, I like it so much that I think I will attempt to upgrade this site to the beta as soon as I test everything on a cloned install first. Look forward to another post about how it goes and hopefully an upgrade in the near future.

I got tired of always manually upgrading the necessary files for my Drupal installation and then copying the config back over. So I've automated almost the entire upgrade process with a shell script. All that I must do myself now is put Drupal into maintenance mode.

drupal_upgrade.sh (Don't forget to make it executable: chmod +x drupal_upgrade.sh)

Note: The script assumes that it and the extracted update is in the next directory up from Drupal. Don't forget to set the Drupal directory variable. Also, obligatory "I'm not responsible if you hose you database/Drupal install". TEST THIS SCRIPT IN A SAFE ENVIRONMENT FIRST.

Just a followup on this post I made a little while back about my plans for replacing my web server. I replaced it about 2 weeks ago now and I am only now getting around to writing about it. What can I say? I've been busy.

I used old parts I had laying around because I really couldn't justify spending money on a new server at this point in time but still felt I needed it. This was a compromise. I ended up with this:

• P4 2.6ghz with hyper-threading
• 1gb (2gb soon) DDR-400
• 40gb system drive
• 160gb data drive

It seems like only a modest improvement over what I had before, but it is definitely noticeable. The improvement is most apparent with VMware Server, which I am using to host 4 virtual servers concurrently to handle other websites I host. I am still running my own sites on the hyper-visor.

The coolest thing about getting the new server though is that I now have a fully redundant backup in the old server. I use shell scripts and cron to keep the web root, Apache configuration, and databases synchronized.

I think I'm long past due replacing my current web server with something more capable and powerful. While my current server does its job well, I'd like to expand it's roles and for that, I need beefier hardware. Currently, I am considering using virtualization to provide virtual servers for everything I need, rather than exposing the "bare-metal" to the internet. Right now I'm not completely sure on what hypervisor/virtualization software to use, but will most likely use something from VMware, specifically, VMware Server or VMware ESXi, both of which are free. There's also Xen and KVM to consider.

Today I found out that you could directly upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake to 8.04. I know, I know... that should have been obvious given that they're both Long-Term Support releases. Anyway, moving right along... the instructions were found here and overall the whole process was very simple besides being constantly asked if I wanted to replace old config files with the newer versions. Looks like my concerns in this post were mostly moot, so far, no problems! *knock on wood*

Those that follow Linux news will certainly know that Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" is coming at the end of April. This release is a major milestone for Ubuntu, because it's the second Long Term Support (LTS) release, after 6.06 "Dapper Drake". That means they'll be keeping it up to date for 18 months as normal, but will provide security updates for 3 years on desktop installations and 5 years for servers.

For those wondering, yes, I do host my website on my own server and it is running Dapper. Previously I had made up my mind that I was going to continue using Dapper for the duration of it's support cycle mostly because it is proven and stable but also because it's a major hassle to upgrade. I'm reconsidering this for a number of reasons, but the main one is simply because I enjoy being on the bleeding edge, and a lot of things on my Dapper server are very out of date and won't ever be updated unless I can find backports, or compile programs myself, neither of which I want to do.