General

Some times we wish to exclude some files and directories when we try to take backup of a website. With tar it is possible. Use the --exclude option. For example, if you want to exclude .git folder and the imagecache directory inside the files folder, use the command: tar -zcvf abc.com.tar.gz --exclude ".git/*" --exclude ".git" --exclude "sites/default/files/imagecache/*" --exclude "sites/default/files/imagecache" public_html

Some of the latest Laptops especially Dell Inspiron 5420 and Lenovo G580 series comes with Atheros Network driver which has some problem with Ubuntu 12.04. The problem is that it will not detect the wired network connection(eth0) even though wireless connection is working fine. We can solve this issue by installing the proper network driver.

Boost is a Drupal module that accelerates the performance of a site by efficient caching of pages. It can be enabled for all pages other than the ones which need to show constantly updating data (for example, a captcha box). NOTE: If you are looking on how to install and configure Boost for your Drupal website, go here: How to install and configure Boost caching module to speed up performance on your Drupal 6 site. Here we list some methods for testing the Boost implementation on a Drupal website:

Generating SSH keys and using them for connecting to SSH servers is a straightforward process on Linux. But for Windows users, Windows does not provide any support for the SSH protocol by default. There is no SSH client that comes by default on Windows. Let alone generating keys.

Unlike proprietary operating systems that comes up with a rudimentary set of applications, Ubuntu and GNU/Linux in general has thousands of freely available Free Software applications available for installation directly from the Internet. These applications are usually available from software archives referred to as repositories. The official Ubuntu repositories contain more than 30000 applications. Having the Ubuntu repositories on DVD can be useful for those users who don't have access to the Internet or has only limited connectivity from the machine where they have their Ubuntu installed but have access from somewhere else to download the repository. Here is a step by step instruction on how to download the complete Ubuntu repositories and build your own set of Ubuntu Repository DVDs. For those who would like to get it done the easy way you can buy a set of Ubuntu Repository DVDs via our RequestCD program

The find command available in GNU/Linux shells is a versatile tool for finding files matching the given conditions in a folder and performing a specific action on the files found. The following command will find all files greater than 1M size in your current folder and ask you if you would like to delete the file find . -size +1M -exec rm -i {} \;

As the world of internet grows day to day, the more educated and ever-wanting userbase now needs more data asynchronously. They don’t like to wait or load another page to see their data. In such situations we developers need to use more and more AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)) in the development of websites. Using AJAX in your web-development workflow is not that much difficult as you think. There is already a wide range of famous ajax libraries that make handling asynchronous requests easy for us.

Apache allows you to protect contents of specific directories in your website or the whole website from unauthorized access using a mechanism called httpd password protection. During development of new sites the partially built sites are protected from unauthorized access using httpd authentication. This could sometimes interfere with testing of integration with third party services that might expect some of your URLs to be accessible without authentication. Here is how you can exclude a given file or directory from httpd authentication

Boundary Value analysis is one of the techniques used in software testing which involves designing of test cases to contain values at the edges, or in other words, it includes values in the minimum and maximum conditions. For testing a Drupal site, these conditions are addressed in the test cases so that we can capture and resolve them earlier, since such extreme ends commonly cause software faults. Boundary value analysis is a black box testing technique.