Hans Salvisberg's blog

On some sites with very mixed audiences I try to get people to use their full names as user names. Sometimes, couples share an account, and then I try to get them to use both of their names. This can result in some very long user names, and Drupal has a nasty habit of truncating after 15 characters.

Consider a couple with a user name of "Jane Doe and John Smith" — John probably won't be happy to get truncated...

If you reserve part of your site for authenticated users, members, or even more selected groups, and even if you don't, you'll soon find out about a problem with RSS feeds: feeds that are available only when the user is logged in, will obviously not be available when she's not. Nevertheless, she will set her feed reader to access the feed...

Drupal requires http://example.com/cron.php being called regularly. You can set this up in Plesk within each site. Plesk will create a corresponding entry in /var/spool/cron/tabs/site_user. The downside of this is that each cron run will produce an entry in the /var/log/messages system log. If you have a couple of sites and each one runs the cron job every hour, then you'll easily end up with hundreds of useless system log entries every day!

Everyone and especially the search engines prefer clean URLs, such as you can see on this site. When you originally install Drupal, it uses URLs with a question mark. In the administrative section there's a test for checking whether your web server can support clean URLs. If it can't, here's what to do:

Open /etc/sysconfig/apache2 in your editor, look for the line starting with APACHE_MODULES=, and add rewrite to the list of Apache modules that your web server loads.

Do you hate redundancy? So do I! Rather than installing and maintaining Drupal and its modules separately for each virtual host, it's much better to install it once and link each domain to the shared copy. Of course, we still want to maintain high security. This blog entry will walk you through installing Drupal 5.1 on a SuSE 10.0 box.

Let's get right to it:

groupadd drupal
groupmod drupal -A wwwrun
groupmod drupal -A psaftp
groupmod drupal -A psaadm

Create a temporary directory for file uploads:

Trivial for those who know, but there's a first time for everything.

[EDIT: See Installing CPAN Perl Modules Revisited for a newer take.]

Here's how to install a module from CPAN:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install full::module::name'

The first time you run this, it will answer with

I would like to host multiple domains and subdomains on my server and be able to use SSL encryption with some of them. Typically, you need to have one certificate for each domain, and you can only have one certificate per IP address, because the SSL protocol is negotiated based on the IP address before the browser sends the host name.

Receiving incoming email and making it available to your users via POP3 or IMAP is only the first half of running a Message Transfer Agent (MTA). The other half is to relay outgoing email from your users to the world.

We don't want to run an open relay, of course, so we we need some form of authorization.

There are a number of issues that need to be fixed/acknowledged before the VPS will run well.

I was running a mail server (SMTP and POP3) for the domain example.com on the old.example.com host and needed to move it to new.example.com. Here's how to do this: