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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
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.
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.