Bill Katz

ActiveGrid just released the early-access version of their application builder and grid application server. The specifics of this open source grid-based web system had been kept under wraps since last November; CEO Pater Yared dropped hints about a Google-inspired system built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python) for delivering scalable web apps. I say "Google-inspired" because ActiveGrid pays a lot of attention to scaling web apps across a grid of commodity computers (minimum hardware: 800+ MHz x86 processor, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB hard drive). ActiveGrid allows six deployment patterns, most of them focused on high-availability. The grid application server is implemented as an Apache module with libraries that run within language-specific modules (mod_python, mod_php, mod_perl, tomcat).

Spammers have begun using trackback comments as a way around the Drupal spam module. Looking over at the Drupal board, I see that some people got hit with hundreds of spam comments. This site got some ads for poker, casinos, and an anti-obesity drug, phentermine. The rising use of comment spam has spurred Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others to embrace the rel="nofollow" tag for hyperlinks.

In the short term, I offer this to Drupal victims:

After much dithering and review of blog & content management systems, I selected Drupal as the engine for my revised website. Why Drupal? The key reasons are:

• Ease-of-use and large selection of modules & themes
• Excellent categorization of content through taxonomy system
• Nice input filter system that lets me choose the format style (e.g. HTML or Textile) for each entry
• Clean URLs through apache mod_rewrite as well as Drupal URL aliasing system
• Built-in revision system so I can handle different versions, although you can't mark one revision published while working on another.

When setting up Drupal and phpBB with PHP 4.3.10, I upgraded to MySQL 4.1 and got this wonderful message:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server

Turns out that MySQL 4.1+ now uses longer and stronger SHA1 password hashes. This is a good thing^TM because MD5 is not long-term secure as has been shown recently.¹

For MySQL and PHP users, this change in password hashing complicates some setups. PHP 5+ programs won't have problems if they use the mysqli function calls. PHP 4, however, has pre-MySQL 4.1 clients so they won't be able to connect to new MySQL servers with the newer password hashes. The gory details can be seen here.