Final Thought

Drupal is a flexible platform and it truly does make it easy for someone with no programming or web design skill to create useful, user friendly websites. The community that supports Drupal is vast, and the module add ons are seemingly endless and well documented.

The first user created on a Drupal install is the master administrator. I reset the user name to this account to "admin", and the password is reset to "drupal2007". You can use this account to administer the server or to give new users administrative rights. The workstation logs on as "student" automatically and this account has administrative rights on the machine.

The original installation will be accessible for a limited amount of time at http://70.135.188.118/. I still use it to host files occasionally, so I will try and keep it up as long as I can.

Thank you to Larry Press for giving me the opportunity to work on this project and making me stick with it, and to the Apache Friends open source community for creating the XMAPP software suite and taking the difficulty out of the install. Now I can tell my friends that I designed my own website with it's own forum!

If a future student needs to work on the server and has any questions about the installation, you can contact me at Ryan@AllionHealthcare.com and I will do my best to answer them.

Ryan

Project Complete

At long last, this project has completed. The last major change to the server was finding the "DOC" module to host files. This module is very simple to use compared to the video and audio upload modules. It easily allows users to create folders and upload files to them. The files are accessible to the outside world with direct links, so you can use it to host pictures or documents for other people to access without them having to log onto the server. The only changes to the settings was to limit the maximum allowed file size and the space available for each user.

The website is now very simple and streamlined, with active modules for blogging, forum posting, and file uploading.

I moved my installation to a Windows XP workstation provided to me by Professor Press.

Here are the instructions on how to move an existing installation:

1. Install the XMAPP suite that configures Apache, MySQL, and PHP onto the target PC.
2. In the XMAPP control panel, set Apache and MySQL to run as a service and make sure they start successfully on reboot.
2. Copy the existing c:\xmapp directory to the new server, and overwrite the folder on the new server.
3. To be safe, enable the windows firewall, and make an exception for HTTP on port 80.

Since the programs are driven by INI files, moving the installation is a simple file copy process once the services are running.