Exporting Custom Configurations From a Drupal 7 Site

After installing a Drupal7 site, I have made several configurations/customizations over time. Now I would like to export them somehow, in order to load them to another site. But the problem is that I don't remember exactly what I have done. The Features module does not help because you have to tell it exactly what to export, but I don't remember all the changes.

How to find all the modifications in the configuration of a server

I manage a virtual web server in the cloud (https://l10n.org.al) where I have made lots of configurations over time: installing new packages, tweakings for optimization, changes related to security, etc. Now, if I want to build another server that has the same function and purpose as the first one, I don't remember all the things that I have touched and changed. The long and tedious way would be to go over all the installations and configurations again, and still I may miss something.

How to set up a chroot environment for testing

Recently I have suffered a total system destruction in one of my computers. It happened while I was testing a software that I am developing, due to a simple bug. It helped me realize my lack of caution while testing unstable things, and I learned that it is always better to do the testing inside a chroot environment. Chroot’s provide isolation from the rest of the operating system, so that in case of severe errors damage can be mitigated.

Using NGINX as a Web Server for Drupal

Nginx (engine-x) is a web server that is regarded to be faster than Apache and with a better performance on heavy load. The difference is summed up succinctly in a quote by Chris Lea on the Why Use Nginx? page: "Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache."

Installing a Clonezilla Server

Clonezilla Server is used to clone many computers simultaneously across a network. This is done using a DRBL server and computer workstations that can boot from a network.

The Digital Signature and the X.509/OpenPGP Authentication Models

This article explains what is a Digital Signature, why it is an important part of the Digital Identity, and how it works. Then it describes the authenticity and social problems related to the usage of the Digital Signature. It explains as well the two authentication models, X.509 and OpenPGP, that can be used to solve these authenticity problems. Finally it makes a comparison between these two authentication models and their features and tries to explain why the OpenPGP model is better.

Virtual Machines on a CentOS Host

A powerful rack server can be used as a host for installing lots of virtual machines, and it can be used as a data storage as well. This article will describe how to use such a server, installed with CentOS, as a host for virtual machines.

B-Translator as a Software Engineering Project

The project B-Translator will be presented, trying to illustrate through it some software development/engineering concepts and practices (how they are actually applied in this project).

How to Secure a Ubuntu Server

Recently I purchased a virtual ubuntu server on rackspace. However I have to manage it myself, and this includes first of all taking care for its security. Securing it is very important and is the first thing to be done, since all the rackspace servers have public IP-s and so are open to all the possible attacks from the Internet. Here I will describe some of the steps that can be done to secure the server.

Improving the Performance of a VM by Using a Real Disk Partition

I have used zentyal as a gateway server, and it is actually running on a virtual machine. An important component of it is squid, which is supposed to improve the efficiency of the network connection by saving in cache the web pages that have been already visited, and fetching them from the cache when they are re-visited.

This is an operation that makes intesive usage of the disk, and virtual disks (used on virtual machines) are not particularly efficient for it. However, a virtual machine can also use a real partition, so the efficience of squid can be improved by attaching a real partition to the virtual machine and using it for the cache.