Installing Drupal

Drupal is an excellent open source content management system.

Once you have a linux install with Apache, PHP, and MySQL installing drupal is a breeze.
Refer to this post for an easy installation of Fedora Core 4.

1. Setup MySQL:
   mysqladmin -u root password new-password
   chkconfig –levels 235 mysqld on
2. Setup Apache:
   chkconfig –levels 235 httpd on
   vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
   -> Change Allow Override None to Allow Override All
   -> Add index.php as first entry under DirectoryIndex
3. Install drupal – follow these instructions
4. Create files subdirectory:
   cd drupal_install_dir
   mkdir files
   chown root:apache files/
   chmod 775 files/
5. Install GD:
   yum install php-gd
6. Finally restart apache: apachectl graceful

Installing Fedora Core 4

This is a very good FAQ regarding installation of Fedora Core 4:
The Perfect Setup – Fedora Core 4
In addition to the standard server install, I chose the following packages:
Server Configuration Tools (all)
Web Server (all)
Mail Server (all)
MySQL Database (all)
Development Tools (Standard)
Administration Tools (all)

Epic 2014

I was at the IL-TCE conference on Friday and went to a session by David Warlick called Right & Wrong on the Information Highway.

He showed a clip that was a generated a good discussion regarding how trustworthy information found on the internet is now and in the future.

Check it out:
Epic 2014

Sending email attachments through the terminal

In restoring a file from our backup machine to a user – I found the easiest way is just to email the file to the user through the terminal.  However since it was a word document it needed to be encoded.  This worked beautifully:

uuencode FILENAME FILENAME | mail -s SUBJECT RECIPIENT

View PDF files directly from Firefox or Camino

One of the nice features about Safari is that it displays the PDF files directly in the browser whereas Firefox and Camino will download them and then open them in Preview.

There is a free non-commercial plugin that will allow Firefox or Camino to display PDF files within the browser.

1. Download here:
   http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/
2. Mount the dmg file
3. Copy the .plugin file to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins to use for all users or ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins to use only for yourself

Happy Valentines Day with Camino 1.0!

Camino the web browser designed specifically for Mac OS X by Mozilla now has published their official 1.0 release.

It is built on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. It also is built on Cocoa so it looks beautiful just like the Mac OS X interface.

It doesn’t have the same extension plug-in that Firefox offers, but it makes up for it with its speed (maybe because I have too many extensions installed!)

Check it out – download here!

Configuring your Windows boxes to keep the same time as your Macs

Maybe I’m picky but our Windows boxes (including our email server) were keeping time that was about 4 minutes faster than our Macs. It was driving me crazy.

So I found this article:
How to configure an authoritative time server in Windows Server 2003
And followed the instructions on our PDC (Primary Domain Controller) and chose time.apple.com as the ntp server.

Beautiful, everything is synchroinzed now.

Crontab entries

Wikipedia has a good entry on crontab.

The crontab is used to schedule command to be executed at a later time or periodically.

The best way to schedule the jobs is to login as the user you want the job to execute as and type:
crontab -e

PHP iCalendar

This is a free Open Source php-based web calendar implementation.
It can be downloaded at: http://phpicalendar.net/

To implement it – all I had to do was copy the files to my web directory and add a few lines of code to my Apache config file to enable webdav for iCal publishing:

Greg Westin describes how to enable WebDav for OSX – but on OSX Server there are even less steps:

1. Edit your apache config file: (by default /etc/httpd/httpd.conf) Right before the first tag – insert this code
2. Then create the password file:
   sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/passwords
   sudo htdigest -c /etc/httpd/passwords/webdav.digest “webdav access” mywebdavuser
3. Then on your calendar directory run:
   sudo chown www:www /mycalendarsdir
4. Finally restart apache:
   sudo apachectl graceful

Adobe’s Plans to support Intel Macs

Here is a link to Adobe’s detailed plans on updating their software and newly acquired Macromedia software to Universal Binaries allowing the software to run natively on the new Intel Macs.

Here is an interpretation from Appleinsider that says support will probably not come until 2007.

Sources:
Macworld: News: Adobe offers further details on Intel plans
AppleInsider | Adobe may not deliver native Intel Mac support until 2007