This morning started off okay, until I checked my email and found an alarm ringing about one of our file servers being offline. Luckily, we have a replicated setup, so no customers were affected, but it is a little worrisome not having the safety net of two replicated servers. The server didn't technically crash, rather, it was a problem with the EC2 instance being unavailable likely due to some unforeseen problem in the Virginia datacenter. Regardless, the first step I took was to get the server accessible via SSH.

Recently we had a spammer compromise a weak password on one of our SmarterMail installations. Over the course of a few hours, the spammer had racked up over 15,000 messages in SmarterMail's spool, not to mention the amount of messages that were delivered successfully.

A recent project required me to create a different notification message per content type. To do this you can use the hook_message_alter() function to override the default message.

Recently I needed to modify a Drupal 7 node form to have two drop down select elements populate based upon a third select element's choice. I have altered select elements in the past to have a single dependency, but never have I made one element control the content of two different elements.

I had to accomplish the task of migrating the content from a Drupal 5 site with 10,000+ nodes to a new Drupal 7 version. The caveat was that all of the node information needed to remain intact due to various links that were entered into the body of posts. My initial thought was to use a .csv file and import directly into the database. After some more research I discovered the migrate and migrate_d2d modules.

I recently needed to alter the address fields within the Ubercart 3 billing pane. Unfortunately, due to the way Ubercart 3 builds these form elements, the standard hook_form_alter() hook was not going to work. After a few hours of searching I finally discovered this post: https://drupal.org/node/2063949#comment-7750227 With that information I was able to alter my billing pane's company field into a select list taken from a taxonomy.

A list of useful commands that can be used to help identify a high server load:

Apache POST DOS Attach

• Check the amount of POST requests to Apache:

  
  /usr/sbin/tcpdump -A -nnn -s0 -l 'dst port 80' | grep -Eo "POST\ /.*"
  

• Find the culprit on a shared hosting environment:

  
  grep POST /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log
  

I was setting up a static mobile website for a Drupal site that was installed within the Aegir hosting environment today. We had been given a static mobile version of the website to load. So, we added the mobile site to a directory within our theme and we needed to setup an alias for this site.

We are running an Ubuntu 12.04 server with the Aegir hosting system and recently upgraded the server software with apt-get. The next day we noticed that the cron queue wasn't running, so we began to investigate. It turns out that the Drush package for Ubuntu had recently been upgraded to Drush 5.9.1, which is incompatible with Aegir 1.x version. So, after some searching, we downgraded the drush package by searching the apt-cache for the previous version of Drush.

Recently an EC2 instance we were using in a production environment was scheduled to go down for maintenance. Normally this would be fine and we would let AWS just handle this. However, their scheduled maintenance window was set for 21:00 UTC, which equates to 17:00 EST. In other words, right at the end of the work day. Not cool! In order to use a maintenance schedule of our choosing, we had to migrate our production instance into a different availability zone prior to Amazon's schedule. So, we setup a test instances and tested migrating.