Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)

Just when we had nearly finished the last round of security upgrades Drupal releases a new set of upgrades for 5 and 6 sites. Fortunately we have this process down pretty well now so it looks like aManda is going to be busy for a while performing upgrades.

One really cool module we have found for version 5 sites is the Update Status Module. This feature is included in Drupal 6 core, but had ben missing from Drupal 5. Now we can be notified whenever contributed modules are upgraded and go and replace them.

One of the main reason for the security patches is the chance for users of the BLOGAPI feature to upload malicious files. This includes users of Live Writer and other applications that take advantage of this feature. This fortunately is not too much of an issue because site administrators should only be providing this feature to users they trust anyway.

WHS

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 was released just the other day, and I took the opportunity in the weekend to install it and then reconnect all the PCs to it. They all worked flawlessly. The most exciting thing is now my 2 Vista 64 machines are now connected and being backed up. Previously one wasn’t being backed up at all though there was no data on the machine, and the other which is my workstation was being backed up to an internal 500gb drive.

If you have a Windows Home Server I recommend downloading the upgrade as it also fixes the data corruption error previously found in a few small number of installs with multiple hard drives.

Microsoft Office

In the process of upgrading Drupal sites to the latest version 6.3, I have come across a configuration difference between version 6 and previous versions.

Where before I used to put contributed modules and themes into the modules and themes folders, now they should reside under the sites\all\modules and sites\all\themes folders.

So now this makes an upgrade quite a bit easier.

Here is our process

1. For version 6 sites, check the available updates for any other module and theme updates that are required. Log into the site www.website.com/user as administrator.
2. Ensure back up is complete of both home directory and database
3. Go to admin settings, Site configuration, and site maintenance and put site into offline mode
4. Then go to administer and change theme to Garland
5. Turn off all non core modules
6. Now delete out all folders and files from public_html (within its Drupal folder) except
1. Sites (IMPORTANT)
2. Files
3. Any other non standard files or folders