ejhildreth'sBlog

Problem: Having a Drupal site automatically run the cron.php script and automatically backup a mySQL database at regular intervals on a Slicehost slice that is running Ubuntu.

Solution: Shell Scripting and Crontab

FYI: I just reran the doxpara.com test using CableOne's DNS servers, and it appears to finally been updated. Thank you CableOne for being on top of this so I didn't have to run all over the valley this weekend updating routers to OpenDNS!

Yesterday, I posted a tweet (http://twitter.com/ejhildreth/statuses/871831244) encouraging people that use CableOne as their Internet Service Provider (ISP) to run the free test at http://doxpara.com. Doxpara.com provides a Domain Name Server (DNS) tool that checks to see if your ISP's servers appear to be vulnerable to DNS Cache Poisoning (this allows the ability for somebody to impersonate any website). The test was created because there is an exploit out in the wild and *most* ISPs were still scrambling to get the hole patched.

Even though the likelihood of an attack on my home network was low, I didn't want to take any chances. I immediately switched my home router over to the DNS servers used by OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com) because they were reporting that they had patched the vulnerability on their systems. Also, I went ahead and tried to contact CableOne to see when they were planning on patching the hole. Since this was a low priority for me, I simply sent CableOne an email to their tech support asking this question:

Well, its been a long time coming, but I finally took the time to start setting up my new business' website: http://koladesigns.com. ¹ If you visit the page, there clearly isn't much to look at; yet. The site is being developed in Drupal 6 and I have an idea for how I want to implement the look and feel (theming). As anybody that has worked with Drupal can tell you, there is most definitely more than one way to skin this cat (pun intended). During this design process, it is my intention to blog about what I am working on so that I can keep a record of the solutions to any hurdles that I find along the way.

Day 1: The theme background image

To kick things off, I needed a potential color scheme to work with. For this project, I really wanted to base everything around the notion that I am powered by cola. Even though soda does not really come in glass bottles anymore, I decided to use a bottlecap as inspiration for my logo. Since this felt a little dated, I decided that maybe my site should go for a more retro look as well. This eventually lead me down the road to using Google Image search to look up images of 50's and 60's artwork that portrayed soda's glory years: the soda shoppe. Once I locked onto a set of colors that I liked, came the next phase: how do I make a web site look like a soda shoppe? The answer is, I don't know! However, I will take it a step at a time to try and implement it all the while trying to balance the limitations of CSS and Drupal Theming.

Day two of running Kubuntu Hardy Heron revealed a minor issues: my VirtualBox wouldn't run. VirtualBox appeared to open up fine, until I selected one of my virtual machines to run. It tried to load it, but errored out because it couldn't find the VM files on the system. I'm sure this stemmed from the upgrade process from Gutsy Gibbon and how it rewrites files. The fix was really easy. I simply reinstalled the Deb package and alls good again!

Note: I use the Deb package directly from Innotek, not the one in the Kubuntu repository. At the time of this writing, they only had a Gutsy Gibbon version, but it seems to work just fine on Hardy Heron.