Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

We're currently experiencing some network connectivity issues in our colocation facility in Michigan.  For about 30 minutes today most of the web sites we host were essentially non-responsive.  The connectivity is improving, but site response is still likely to be sluggish.  We're working with the data center staff to resolve the network issue. 
Update -
The problem has been a large denial of service attack against our data center.  The problem has been resolved, and response time on the servers is now normal. 

Drupal Camp WI was great, with a lot of exchange of information and ideas.
Spent a good deal of time both going to the state Democratic Convention, and then making an extended road trip to Troy, Michigan to expand our web server colocation presence.  We now have more servers, more capacity, and higher-speed configurations.

Lots of activity, lots of Drupal talk.  Wish you were here!

I'm going to be in Madison next weekend for Drupal Camp Wisconsin.  If you're interested in Drupal, come on down. And I'll be glad to meet you.  Looks like there are going to be a lot of interesting sessions, and these things are always a great way to meet people and learn more.

A few hours ago the Drupal security team released two new versions of Drupal, primarily to fix a security vulnerability. No fear, we've rather quickly upgraded all of our hosted Drupal sites to the new versions.  Drupal 5 sites were all upgraded to Drupal 5.17 from 5.11.   Drupal 6 sites were upgraded from Drupal 6.10 to Drupal 6.11.
Please let us know if you see any issues with your sites, but this is a fairly minor upgrade and we don't expect to see any new issues.
The Drupal 6.11 upgrade should also fix some issues we've been seeing with sites having trouble with their menu caching systems - this has primarily made a lot of bogus error messages, but in some cases it has caused some noticeable performance issues.

The CiviCRM folks are having a documentation sprint to write a new CiviCRM book.  This is something that's been needed now for some time.  The book will be available as a free download, or as a printed book you can purchase.  We'll let you know when it's available, and what we think of it.

Well, that was interesting -
Our colocation facility in Michigan fell off the internet for a while today - this caused an outage of about 15 minutes for some of our hosted web sites (including this site).  We're still waiting for news from the colo facility, buit it appears that things have now recovered. Some of our sites and mailing lists werre unavailable from about 3:10 PM Central until about 3:25 PM Central.

There's a new report on CMS systems from the folks at Idealware.  Ignore the fact that we're one of the sponsors ard are listed in the report -it's a really good unbiased view of the different CMS systems and how they would fit into a nonprofit's world.

The folks at Idealware publish a lot of interesting and useful reports on using technology for your nonprofit group.  They've just released an article on using RSS and RSS tools for your nonprofit.  It's a good read.
http://www.idealware.org/articles/rss_tools.php

Time to talk about a few things I've used lately that I like:

Artisteer - I blogged about this recently on Drupal For Users.  Artisteer is a theme generation program that lets you build themes for Druipal, Joomla!, Wordpress, and a few other environments.  It's fairly bare bones in a lot of ways - it lets you generate pretty and well-formed themes (at least in Drupal, which is the only place I've tried it).  On the other hand, it currently only runs in WIndows (ick and double ick) and won't do any of the really neat things possible in Drupal.  I can see myself using this as a rapid prototyping tool though, doing the first 80% or so of theme development, after which it will be time to drag out the PHP and CSS skills to do the rest of the stuff.  I'm hoping this tool will improve with age.  Even with the limitations, the standard version is $129 which will probably pay for itself the first time I use it.

NOTE - Artisteer 2.1 just came out - it's a big improvement. The primary improvement is a lot of bug fixes, a little more flexibility, and the fact that the default themes are now built with multiple real Drupal regions, so in a lot of cases you're not going to have to muck around with sticking new regions in the themes.  This site is currently displaying using a simple Artisteer theme that I built in about 15 minutes.

Swekey This is another product that gives me mixed feelings.  Basically it's a little USB key that you insert into your computer, and that generates one-time passcodes.  Typically you'd use it to secure web sites and applications.  I use it to make sure that nobody is logging in to my web sites as me - if the key ain't plugged in to the computer, I can't log in.  If the key gets unplugged, I get logged out.  There are fairly nice integration modules available for it in many different web applications, including Drupal, Squirrelmail, and more.  My main reservations about it involve the fact that I've had some issues with it in Windows.  Works pretty well on my Linux and Mac machines, but it's had fits with both of the Windows systems I've used it with (though apparently this is due to various issues Windows has with hot-plugging USB devices - I actually mostly got this squared away, but it required a lot of disgusting register editing - on the other hand it fixed  a coupel of issues I've been having with CDROM drives in Windows as well, so ---  Gist of it is, this was mostly Windows brokennes, not Swekey brokenness.

CrashPlan - This is a great backup system that we've been using internally, and that we're starting to offer as a backup product.  It's the first backup product that I'm really happy with (other than big expensive backup systems that I used to wrangle, and a few of the open  source apps like Bacula).  Once it's set up and installed, it just takes care of itself, continually backing up your system while you work.  One of the innovative things about this is the ability to back up to a remote server on the Internet and to a local system in your office at  the same time.  Gives you the best of two worlds - quick restore from your local server and an archival copy off-site for emergency restores in case of a physical disaster.  We're now offiering a managed service basd on CrashPlan where you can automatically back up your systems both to our own backup servers and to your own local server or spare drive.  Highly recommended, works with Linux, Windows, MAC, and Solaris.  There's also a smaller version that's available as a free download if you just want to back up to disk amongst your own systems (though you need to pay for this if it's for commercial use, or if you want the full feature set of the system).  Let us know if this interests you.  Backup prices start at $5/month per system, depending on how much disk quota you need for backups. 

AlertThingy - This is the first tool for tracking social network updates that I've actually liked enough to use.  Follow your Tweets, Facebook, RSS Feeds, and a lot more in one window, and post to Twitter and Facebook from it. This just gets better with every release, with more added features and services.  Now if I could only convince myself that all of this constant interruption is really a good thing.

We have interest from people from time to time about CiviCRM.  In an attempt to make it easier for you to look into the capabilities of CiviCRM, we've uploaded a copy of the CiviCRM manual below.

This morning there was a new Drupal security release.  For the time being, pending further testing of the new Drupal releases, we've applied the security patch to all Drupal instances we are hosting.  We will upgrade all of the sites to Drupal 5.11 or 6.5 within the next several weeks, but for the time being the security fixes are installed.

The much-feared DNS vulnerabilities found by Dan Kaminsky seem to be being exploited already.  If you are concerned about whether the DNS servers you are using are fixed or not, you can check this at Dan's web site by going here and using the widget on the site to check your ISP's DNS servers.  I know mine are okay because they're my own servers .

There's been quite a lot of coverage about the recently discovered vulnerabilities in the DNS protocol.  We thought we'd mention that we patched for those vulnerabilities within 24 hours after repaired binaries were released by the vendors, and we also made some changes to our DNS server configuration to make the servers less vulnerable. 

We do this sort of thing all the time, and it's one of the reasons that our web hosting is a little more expensive than some others - that is, we're actually paying attention.  

Use these tools to save gas, and keep traveling all over.