Eggplant Clients

Drupal 4.6.5 upgrades

If you're running on a hosted drupal setup with us, I've been upgrading everybody to 4.6.5 tonight. I know I said otherwise previously, but it looks like the transition to 4.7 is going to be longer than anticipated, so this was a good time to get things going.

Auto Responder Functional

Good News! We've finally gotten the AutoResponder working again for email. This means that you can set a vacation notice for each of your email accounts. You can do this by doing the following:

go here: https://pa.eggplantmedia.com/users/login.php

Click on "Auto Response"

Fill out the form

you are now on "vacation"

Drupal Upgrade Plans

Currently we're running drupal 4.6.4 on all live drupal installations. We're currently watching the extremely rapid movement toward 4.7.x which is going to be a major update for drupal.

If there are features that you need from 4.6.5, we will switch you over to the newer version (some bug fixes), however, our current plan is to wait for 4.7 stable. As usual, if you have any questions, please ask ahoy!

arthur

MySQL server updates

Micah and I have just done a fairly large overhaul of the MySQL server setup we're using. You may notice that if you've been connecting to our MySQL server at:
127.0.0.2
You'll now be connecting on:
192.168.0.3
There are some complicated resasons for this because of how the vserver setup is running, however, this takes care of some lingering issues.

Drupal 4.6.3 security patched

A secuirty vulnerablity was just announced for drupal core. I've patched the core modules as described here: http://drupal.org/drupal-4.6.4 Drupal should now be secure again.

New Support Services

As announced in our Fall 2005 newsletter we are now offering new support services in the form of the Extended Support Program.

Clients not opting for the Extended Support Program will, as of November 1st, 2005, be included in our standard support services program. Read all about it here.

DNS Updates

This is just a friendly reminder that you need to change over your domain names over to use our new name services. I know that most of you already have, but for the handful of you who haven't, you need to do so by the 1st of Nov. to ensure that there is no interruption in service. All that you need to do is point your domain at our new name servers: ns2.eggplantmedia.com stork.riseup.net If you don't move your domain over, your service unfortunately will be interrupted. If you have any questions or need any assistance in doing so, please feel free to get in touch.

Drupal: Flexinode Upgraded

Just to let everybody know, I just upgraded the flexinode module in drupal to deal with the security issue addressed here: http://drupal.org/node/32940

Drupal Sandbox

For those of you using the Drupal content management system or who are considering it, I've setup a sandbox where people can play around with how the system works. If you want to check out a new theme or a new module, we can install them there for you to! If your interested in experimenting with Drupal, just drop me a note. I'll set you up with an account and let you know where to go. Obviously this will be a playground, so don't expect that things will remain the same. You'll probably want to tag your posts with your name so other people don't run them over

Configuring MySQL

Having difficulty connecting your application to our database server? Make sure that you're pointing at the right server. On all Eggplant servers, the MySQL server is located at: 127.0.0.2:3306

Podcasting with MT

I've just added the enclosure plugin to MT so it's easy to add podcasting tags to your rss feeds. Check out the author's page for more information on how to encorporate the tags into your rss feed.

BCC Lists, Spam, and AOL

One of the problems with sending large volumes of email is that it often looks like spam. While we prefer to call what our clients send out tofu, sometimes you have to call a processed food a processed food.

If you're going to send bulk email, and you're going to use our servers to do so, here are some guidelines:

If you send out a mass mail, make sure that you include clear instructions on how the recipient can remove them self from your email lists.
Provide information on how you got their email address
If you find the need to use BCC fields you probably need to send your mail a different way.

You have a few different options if you don't want to conform to this:

Send your email through your local ISP
Ask us to setup a list serve for you.
Use a hosted service like constant contact.

How do I send a .exe file?

Unfortunately, many viruses are exe files, so we've configured our mail system to automatically filter out all exe files. While this makes sending exe files harder, it reduces the number of viruses that end up in your inbox. If you're really sure that you want to send somebody an exe file, you can do so by compressing into some other format. By using a zip or tar encoding, you can then easily send your exe file through our system. This also reduces the file size, so it has an added bonus.

MailMan 2.1.5

We've just deployed MailMan 2.1.5 for all of our list serve hosting. This is a major upgrade which has been part of a series of software upgrades that we've been doing over the past few months. The upgrade offers many new features including better membership management, archive options, bounce options, internationalization, and more.

Web Based MySQL Administration

If you'd like to administer your MySql database that's hosted on black.eggplantmedia.com, you can go to: https://admin.eggplantmedia.com/phpmyadmin/