Guus Bosman

You can now log in to Guus Bosman.nl using your Facebook.com account.

This means you have one less password to remember!

The old method will also continue to work.

Today I upgraded the website to Drupal 6.

The upgrade went smooth and most parts of the website have been converted. The only thing remaining is the address book. This requires some extra work and hopefully I'll get to that Sunday or Monday, which is a day off, Labor Day.

The visible changes between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 are pretty small, but things have improved behind the scenes. If you see anything that doesn't work right, or something is missing, please let me know.

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For the address book on our site I used CiviCRM, an open source CRM system. I recently upgraded from CiviCRM 1.9 to 2.0, and since the APIs changed I had to update the block with birthdays that I wrote two years ago.

The primary change in CiviCRM 2 that impacted the block was the merge of civicrm_individual into civicrm_contact, a sensible schema change. Secondly, the public API's method calls are now organized in smaller modules and were renamed.

I just upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.5.

Upgrade was a breeze, as always. I didn't use sysmerge this time, and simply patching worked fine.

Small change in procedure; no reboot into the new kernel was necessary until all userland components were also upgraded.

You may have noticed that the website has been really slow in the last month or two. Finally, we figured out what the problem was and I'm happy to say that the speed is back to normal.

The problem started two months ago when a new DSL modem was installed and the website started to work really slow. Jaap and I have done a lot of research to see what happened, including re-wiring lots of cables and switches and network cards... thank you so much! The first suspect was the new modem, a "Fritzbox", but all the settings looked fine and there was nothing in the log files. Traceroute told us that performance was quite decent. Thanks also to Ben from OpenNMS for your help.

In the end, it turned out to be unrelated to cables -- instead, there was a configuration setting on the server ("DNS servers") that needed to be updated. Once that was done, performance was back to normal. A great relief.

One of the modules on my website, Book Review, is old and hasn't been updated since September 2007. Drupal has a great version/stability tracking system, and it's clear that this module isn't maintained anymore. Over time I want to upgrade my website to Drupal 6 so it's time to move away from unsupported modules.

On a technical level a book review is just a couple of text fields (author, ISBN number) combined with the standard Drupal text fields body and title. That makes it a great candidate for creating of a custom Node using Drupal's Content Creation Kit (CCK).

Here is how I converted from module Book Review CCK using the excellent node_import module and custom MySQL statements to export book reviews to a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file.

I upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.4 yesterday.

They now have a sysmerge tool that helps in upgrading the /etc directory. It worked well, but I think it's somewhat overkill for my simple system. Using their patch files for /etc has always worked in the past, and I think I'll stick with that next time.

The website has been off-line for about 72 hours, due to an internet provider outage in the Netherlands.

Things obviously are now working again; thanks Jaap and Mieke for your help with getting the system back up and thank you readers, for your patience.

Three weeks ago Drupal 6 was officially released. There are lots of improvements in the new version such as better anonymous commenting, but my main reason for upgrading is to make sure I'll always have the best security fixes in place.

Stuff that I used to have a plug-in for, such as 'Pretty signatures' and the very useful 'Update status module' are now part of the standard distribution.

However, some major modules that I use do not have a 6.0 version yet. Most critically, CiviCRM, CCK and the Views module are still in development. These are modules I use extensively, so I'll defer upgrading until versions of those modules for Drupal 6.0 become available.