A friend sent me a message today to say that this site was down with some cryptic error message. In the course of solving that mystery, I found that I could delete something like 200MB of data from the database. Doing so took several minutes, but once I did I was able to successfully upgrade the old Drupal from 4.x to 5.x and then from 5.x to 6.12. I've spent a couple hours lately trying to do the upgrade and am happy that I've finally accomplished it.

Boring details follow.

In the course of the upgrade I lost the old theme that Ernie Fulton had designed for me. Two major upgrades later and the way that themes work has changed dramatically (probably twice). Go figure. Perhaps I can get someone to design me a new one as a project for 521 or 566 in the fall.

One of the big advantages of this version is that I was able to turn on login via OpenID, so you can log in using your Google account, for example. Also, I have configured CAPTCHA using reCAPTCHA which not only thwarts spam-bots, but also helps to digitize scanned documents and radio shows. As I understand, the same technique is used by spammers. They get those CAPTCHA images from sites they want to hack, present those images to people who want to see pictures of naked people, and get those people to provide the words in the images.

I also cleaned up stuff a bit, leaving the Drupal stuff in its own directory and using Apache Aliases to provide access to other non-Drupal stuff rather than mixing them in with the Drupal files. I figured this out last week when I moved my Moodle server to a new machine running CentOS5.2. I'm now able to add a new Moodle instantiation by creating a database and adding a single line to the Apache config file. Moodle even creates the directory for uploaded files. The cool thing is that they all use the same Moodle directory, so I can upgrade all of the Moodles at once by upgrading the Moodle directory that the alias points to. I really should consider alt.recovery.sysadmin.