steve's blog

Upgrading PHP and MySQL on Red Hat Enterprise Edition

Enterprise installs of GNU/Linux promise well-supported and rock-solid combinations of software packages.The problem with upgrading the software on an Enterprise install is that the built-in program management system only lets you upgrade and install the limited selection of packages and versions that make up that particular distro.*

MySQL permissions for backup

It's a really good idea to use a least-privilege approach to most system administration tasks, and especially automated ones. This post describes using a "read only" MySQL user to handle backing up MySQL databases.

We use mysqldump to backup our databases on a regular basis, using scripts like this one:

Drupal and CiviCRM resources

There is a lot of documentation for developers and hackers working on Drupal. Resources for the everyday end user, however, are not always so easy to find. This list collects of some of the better introductions to using Drupal from the perspective of creating and organizing content for any manner of web site. Hope it's useful ...

Upgrading Drupal sites

This is a very rough outline of my approach to updating Drupal sites. Note that it assumes both that no core files have been customized and that you have command-line access to a Unix or GNU/Linux system.

1. Set up a working directory (or use an existing one)

mkdir drupal_upgrade

cd drupal_upgrade

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