Unity Migration Blog

Microsys folks,

I've created a new category on the blog "Reports and Updates."

If you could include this category as you post your AD pilot activities, it will allow the reminder script (still being worked on) to detect when you've posted your updates, and not hassle you further about them.

At the last microsys staff meeting we talked about how hard it was to get documentation up, and keep it current, and how so many of our development efforts were coming suspiciously close to reinventing a wiki :-)

We talked about looking for a wiki that "sucked less" that might actually help us make and update content, and not just have to learn new markup. I haven't started on that, yet.

What I have found is a GPL'd content management system called Drupal that seems to have a lot of the features we thought were important. These would be:

• Trivial integration with Active Directory or Kerberos (or WRAP) authentication.
• Some sort of authorization scheme to allow for several publishing roles. In a perfect
  world, one that could use AD
• As standardized and/or varied markup as possible

Well, drupal seems to have all that. It has really strong blogging and forum support, and one can have comment pages on most any content, which is pretty cool, and it has a concept of creating shared "books" from a variety of sources and authors. Plus, it has all sorts of blogger apis for external content creation methods, and you can enter (x)html in the text entry boxes and it just works.

It seems like it has the key advantages of wiki (comments, revisions, distributed content creation, only a web browser required) without the disadvantage of special markup.

I think this would be an easy deploy, since they mention how to integrate it with AD in their docs. I'm not sure how hard it will be to get all the features up and going, as it's got quite an array of plug-ins and setup options.

It is SQL based, so it may be a pain to access from Contribute.

Anybody care to try this one, or have another you prefer?

I've moved the forum and the blog out of the htdocs folder, and into their own seperate directories off of \\web00\d$

I've added a line in Apache's httpd.conf to include any .conf files kept in \\web00\d$\Apache2\conf.d and added a blog.conf and forum.conf there. This will let us make smaller, more specific changes, rather than always editing the main httpd.conf and potentially growing it to an unmanagable size.

The end result of all of this is that now you can use Dreamweaver to manage the \\web00\web space, and DW won't be tempted to mess with things it doesn't really understand.

The blog software was upgraded to version 1.8.2 yesterday, and then to 1.8.5 today. The 1.8.5 download wasn't available when I began looking at the upgrade. The 1.8.5 upgrade only involved copying over some newer files.

The database had to be upgraded as part of the 1.8.2 upgrade. Daniel said it shouldn't really reside on mysql01, so it was moved from to mysql02 as part of the upgrade process.

There are some much better features with the newer version. Most importanly, Antispam works better. We apologize for the spam comments that have been hitting this blog.

The phpBB forum software was also upgraded to version 2.0.21 and the database was moved to mysql02.

Andy and I have poked the microsys.unity.ncsu.edu CNAME so that it points to web00.

We're watching things to fix any little surprises that arise from the host change, but little things may need to be adjusted, especially today (Fri 2006-10-13)

If you find something broken, please let us know, either here or via microsys@help.ncsu.edu

Debbie pointed out that the upload feature wasn't working on the blog. I came across this problem today as well. Files you upload get saved to \blog\media on the web server. The Service group only had read rights to it. I added write writes and the upload feature works again. I don't know what caused this to break.