Temporary URL for Hosted Drupal

I recently moved one of my sites from GoDaddy to Host Gator. My initial impressions of Host Gator are favorable compared to GoDaddy. One issue that vexed me almost immediately is attempting to set up and configure Drupal 7 on the new host while my DNS still pointed to the old hosting site.

I wanted the old site to be available until the new site was operational and I was ready to cut over. Tech Support was able to provide a temporary URL but it returned a 404 for everything except the home page. They were unable to figure out a solution and ultimately told me it was not possible with Drupal. Not a good sign for Host Gator support.

Ultimately I found that editing the sites/default/settings.php and changing the $base_url to http://your-server-ip-address/~username

Then edit the .htaccess file in the public_html directory.
 Find the RewriteBase and change it to /~username.

These changes enabled all the functionality that I needed to configure the site and get it up and running.
When I am ready to make the switch, I just need to revert the changes.

Syslog to MySql on openSUSE

I have been experimenting with openSUSE lately as I am not impressed with the direction Mandriva Linux is going. Mandriva has been my main distribution since early versions of Mandrake back around 1998.

I followed the steps in my earlier post but I had to fiddle with a few more things to get it running on openSUSE.

In /etc/rsyslog.conf I added:

$ModLoad imudp         # load udp server
$UDPServerRun 514      # start udp server

the UDP server was not running by default so I added it and poked a hole in the firewall so that I could log the router messages to the database.

Network Discovery Windows 7

At some point in the recent past I noticed that I could not browse the local network.
I had recently upgraded to SBS 2011 after the upgrade I was able to browse the network but not now.
I could still access all of the resources on the network, so it was not a permission problem.
Network Discovery was turned on in the Advanced Sharing Settings of all of the Windows 7 computers.

After googling and bingleing many people wrote that they turned on the Computer Browser service.
However in Windows 7 and Server 2008, the browser service is deprecated and no longer used.
Dom's Techie Blog pointed to the services that need to be running for Network Discovery to work.
All of mine were set to the correct settings and running except that Function Discovery Resource Publication was set to manual and not running. Everything I could find stated that it should be set to manual.

On a hunch I started the Function Discovery Resource Publication service on a few computers and I was able to browse to them on the network almost instantly. I am not sure why I am not able to browse with the services set to default but I created a new Global Policy to set the service to Automatic and applied it to all of the computers in the domain.

I can now browse all of the computers but I still do not have a valid cause for what happened. I am going to try to research this one some more and see what happens.

Exchange 2010 Activesync Issue

I upgraded my Exchange server from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 as part of the migration to SBS 2011. After the upgrade I was making good progress ironing out issues until I tried to sync my android phone.

The native android email in Android 2.2 was failing with an unspecified error. I then tried Touchdown by Nitrodesk. It was also failing but they have nice logging built into their software and I was able to see the following:


Checking Certificate...
Checking ActiveSync with SSL...
Server is Microsoft-IIS/7.5
ActiveSync was found
ActiveSync Version :Versions:Microsoft-IIS/7.5,2.0,2.1,2.5,12.0,12.1,14.0,14.1
Trying activesync protocol -116...
ActiveSync provisioning returns HTTP:200
Error provisioning ActiveSync: Policy status is 0
Trying activesync protocol 2.5...
ActiveSync provisioning returns HTTP:200
ActiveSync provisioning success
The following policies have been requested :

Refreshing AS folders
Error refreshing folders

Checking 2007 with SSL...

 The error refreshing folders was the key and NitroDesk support pointed me to the Nick MacKechnie blog. The main idea is that there is an issue with upgrading to Exchange 2010 and some of the permissions are not set correctly.

Another good Exchange troubleshooting tool I found is the Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer . This tool pointed right to the HTTP 500 error I was getting which pointed me to a Technet Article that described essentially the same issue.

I followed the steps but in my case I had about 10 Exchange server entries so I selected the first one and chose "include inheritable permissions from parent". After the obligatory  OK clicks I ran the Exchange checker again and it passed. Then I tried my Droid in both Touchdown and the Native app and everything worked.

Adobe Reader X Strikes Again

On my Windows machine I use TeXnic Control Center to write and compile my Latex documents.
One of the many features I like is one click compiling of the Latex and it opens up the pdf so I can take a look.

The upgrade new version of Adobe Reader X caused this functionality to stop working. Adobe reader would open but not my document and then after a bit an error window would pop up.

After a bit of searching it appears that Adobe decided to break backward compatibility and change the DDE commands. To make Texnic work again I had to make some changes.

First in Texnic go to the build menu, Define Output Profiles and select LaTeX => PDF.
Then select the viewer tab and change each of the server names from acroview to AcroviewR10.

In one of the posts on the Adobe Forum an adobe rep stated that not only did they change it on purpose but they intend to change the version number with each new adobe version i.e. AcroviewR11.

Now to solve the second part of the problem you will need to go into the Adobe settings and disable the protected mode on startup.

These changes got me back up and running so that I could continue writing my paper. Lesson learned, do not upgrade any software when you are in the middle of writing a paper.

Syslog to MySQL

I had a need to put Syslog data into a database for further analysis.
Using one of my linux boxes this turned out to be much easier than I thought, at least for basic functionality.

Basically I followed the instructions at http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_mysql.html
 and everything just worked.

I already had MySQL installed and Rsyslog was the default syslog on my Linux distribution so I used the included script to create the database, then I created the account.

mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/rsyslog-mysql/createDB.sql

grant all privileges on Syslog.* to 'Syslog'@'%' identified by 'password' with grant option;

Then I modified the rsyslog config file.

#put this line as the first line in /etc/rsyslog.conf
$ModLoad ommysql

#this line logs everything
*.*       :ommysql:127.0.0.1,Syslog,Syslog,password
#*.*       :ommysql:127.0.0.1,db-name,db-user,db-password

Then I restarted the Rsyslog process.
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rsyslogd restart

Then I issued a 'SELECT * FROM Syslog.SystemEvents;'


I saw that the local machine was logging all of its syslog data and the other devices that were logging to the syslog server were also showing up in the database. As a point of interest, all of the data was still being put in the regular syslog file as well.

Future work on this will be to tailor what gets logged and some possible customizations.