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Drupal Needs a New Home
reardonsteel writes "All of the Drupal websites were offline for about two days because of a server meltdown at the organization's hosting provider. The main Drupal website is back up with a single temporary page and they've announced a fund-raising drive to raise US$3000 for a new server to be hosted at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University's server farm. Drupal is the leading open-source (written in PHP) content management system and is used to power tens of thousands of websites, blogs, community sites, etc." At this point, all they need is an actual server, too: the OSL has agreed to provide rack space, bandwidth, power, backup facilities and support.
If you don't know anything about the software I listed above, just google them!
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
Why do i care about this project?
It needs your money.
What was its place
drupal.org
and its goals?
Collect $3000.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The first several google links all appear to point to the site that is down. Even the cached links I read didn't get to the part that actually described what it was. Hope that helps.
Kirby
Certainly could. But I've never heard about the Mamboserver project ( http://www.mamboserver.com/ ) before. But they dont claim to be leading in the CMS business, just among the most powerful *shrug*
To answer the question, what is Drupal...
Drupal is the open-source CMS behind:
and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.
Just looking at the page now.. Received: $6468 USD I guess they're going to get their new server ;-)
From the single page, it says:
Fundraise status
Start date:
13 hours 5 min ago
Received:
$6468 USD
Target:
$3000 USD
Last updated:
2 min 56 sec ago
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
liqbase
...seeing as the main drupal tarball is only ~450k.
I am NaN
xfce just got donated a new server from 2x.com For less than 1600 dollars. 3000? gimme a break!
I think that Drupal wants something more than a toy. A box full of a bunch of no-name, el-cheapo hardware isn't really going to cut it. $3K for a low to mid level, brand name server with some guts to it and a real warranty is a fair price.
-h-
Security is excellent. However, a recent exploit in a popular open source xml-rpc module that is also used by many other program other than Drupal was recently reported to have a security hole. The Drupal project quickly released a patch to fix this problem last week. Sites that have not applied this patch are vulnerable.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Today, CivicSpace is a distribution of Drupal: their core is unforked, and their modules are developed and stored in the main Drupal repository. They contribute patches to the main project as well as work on their own stuff.
Here is your one stop place to compare CMS ... cmsmatrix.org
No sig for now.
It could well have been the recently revealed XML-RPC exploit which Drupal appears to have been vulnerable to.
Debian released an updated Drupal security package today. I'm sure other distributions have also done so, or are about to.
I mean, what type of computer costs 3000? You can get a good rackmount for $1200. Usually, all it takes to host a website is a high end desktop at up to $950.
Many computers cost $3000 and up. I've seen rackmount machines from HP, Dell and Sun all cost way more than $3000.
Mostly it depends on what their uses are. If they are just using it to host their website they probably don't need much of a server, if they are using that server as a development/test platform as well I'm sure it would be helpful to have a somewhat bigger machine. Actually, from their site:
Currently, drupal.org runs on a shared server paid for and maintained by Kjartan. The server is a single Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM. There are about 20 sites running on the server, including some of our sites like http://drupal.org/, http://drupaldocs.org/ and http://cvs.drupal.org/. In addition to the websites, the server hosts our mailing lists, mailing list archives and CVS repositories. Last month, drupal.org alone served more than 3 million pages for 100 Gb of traffic (this does not include any of the other sites or services; non Drupal websites, Drupal mailing list traffic, etc).
Where I work we run HP DL380 machines, which is not really a high end server. Base price on those is $2899. In a perfect world, that would be about the class of server I would want to run a site like Drupal has.
Find coupons in Greeley
What a bunch of asshats!
My web server is a mere Pentium III Xeon dual 700mhz but I have 4 gigs of RAM. That's right! 4 gigs of sweet, beautiful, delicious, delectible RAM. Even my home computer has more RAM than Drupal's "server".
SlashChick, just wanted to say that we appreciate your offer and wouldn't mind discussing some kind of backup mirroring situation with you.
The reason why your offer was treated as such was not because we don't appreciate it -- indeed we've had a few offers and we're fortunate to receive them!
As one of the proponents of this project (which I suggested more than a month ago but only became serious about around the middle of June) I know that there were a number of possibilities that we considered before deciding to go with OSL.
In particular, I've maintained an excellent relationship with Scott Kveton over there during my time at Spread Firefox. He was an excellent resource and advocate during that time and in fact offered to host Drupal.org sometime back in February when I mentioned the idea to him.
As part of the arrangement, we needed to purchase the hardware on which drupal.org would live. The $3000 target was set by the following recommended specs, supplied by Scott:
Dell PowerEdge 1850 1U
2 x 2.8Ghz Xeon w/ 1Mb cache 800Mhz FSB
2GB RAM
2 x 73 GB SCSI disks
RAID controller for RAID1 (mirror)
Redundant Power Supply
From there, Dries (Drupal's founder), Steven Peck, Kieran Lal (of CivicSpace) and myself collaborated on a fundraising strategy, with Dries and Steven writing up the description that ended up on Drupal.org.
Ironically, or perhaps just as one could have predicted, drupal.org went black for two days just as we were finalizing the copy. With drupal.org down, I presume Dries moved the DNS to another host and posted the text we had.
13 hours later we more than doubled our goal thanks to the collective economic power of the open source community!
So in sum, SlashChick, we do really appreciate your offer, but we had already staked out a plan a month ago and drupal.org's going black was simply an oddly timed incident that spurred the community to action! Feel free to get in touch with me to discuss your offer further if you'd like.