Drupal Solutions Comparison For Multiple Sites With Related Content - Acquia Site Factory vs Aegir Project vs Custom Stack

(image courtesy: http://www.clickwrite.com)

Imagine you have a scenario where an enterprise wants to be able to spin up multiple websites, micro sites to be precise, which are independent of each other, allow for pushing and pulling content from a single source of truth or from each other, are easily manageable and independently configurable.

You would be surprised to know how common a scenario that is for many enterprises.

I had to research various options and propose an architecture for precisely such a scenario. I might have excluded some of the obvious choices, so if you have suggestions they are always welcome.

Drupal Solutions Comparison For Multiple Sites With Related Content - Acquia Site Factory vs Aegir Project vs Custom Stack from Sumeet Pareek

To me, barring high initial upfront costs, Acquia site factory is the obvious winner as a solution of choice to manage multiple related sites. I remember Acquia started with the vision of becoming to Drupal what Ubuntu and Redhat are to Linux, and then over time became the much needed stable support and a go to organization for enterprise adoption of Drupal. I am glad to see that with site factory Acquia has done a great job of 'listening to the customers' and has delivered a valuable Drupal platform.

I am curious how others experience has been with site factory, or with the aegir project, or both!

Elizabeth Ki Hindi Notebook

Elizabeth हिन्दी सीखना चाहती है। वो हिंदी क्लब के meeting  में आई थी। कम बोल रही थी। बोल ही नहीं रही थी। जो भी बात कर रहा होता, उससे मुस्कुराते हुए देखती रहती। एक white american जितनी गोरी। सुंदर चेहरा। दुबला शरीर। लम्बे सुनहरे बाल। ढीला ढाला  low cut वाला टॉप पहने unaware सी बैठी थी। काफी शर्मा रही थी।  और काफी curious सी भी थी। एक नोटबुक में बीच बीच में कुछ लिखती रहती । और आतुरता से सबको देखती। मैंने Elizabeth से पूछा के क्या मैं उसकी नोटबुक देख सकता हूँ। बेचारी मना नहीं कर पाई। उसकी नोटबुक देख कर मैं खुश हो गया। भयंकर खुश। मेरी ख़ुशी देख कर वो खुश हो गई। मैंने उसे अपने स्कूल के दिनों के बारे में बताया। अपनी हिन्दी की लिखावट दिखाई। उसकी लिखावट मोतियों जैसी थी। और मेरी ऐसी के मानो जैसे कागज़ पर श्याही में गोते लगाए मकोड़े dance कर गए हों। हम सब लोगों ने खूब बातें की। भाषाओँ के बीच के रिश्तों कि। भाषाओँ के हमारे व्यहवार पर, और हमारे व्यहवार के हमारी भाषा पे असर पर। सजहता और जटिलता पर। सीखने सीखने के तरीकों पर। वो अपने आप को language nerd बुलाती है। मैंने Elizabeth से कहा के वो इंडिया ज़रूर जाए। टारगेट दे दिया के 2015 में ही जाए। ये भी कहा के डरे नहीं, इंडिया में जितने ऐसे लोग मिलेंगे जिनसे उसे बच के रहना पड़ेगा, उतने ही या उसे ज्यादा ऐसे दोस्त मिलेंगे के वो वहीँ बस जाना चाहेगी।  अंदर ही अंदर एक silent prayer भी कह डाली के Elizabeth का इंडिया में experience उसकी हिन्दी जितना ही सुंदर हो। उस डर का क्या फायदा के शायद ऐसा ना हो? और उस डर का इलाज़ क्या हो सोचिये? वैसे मैंने Elizabeth को homework दे दिया है के वो अच्छा सा हिन्दी गाना सीख कर सुनाये अगली बार।

(Solved) Error in Installing VirtualBox on Windows 7 with Symantec Endpoint Protection

It has been a long time since I used Windows, so the first thing I wanted to do with my new ThinkPad with Windows 7 Enterprise Edition was to setup a Virtual Machine and Ubuntu.

Doing so ended up being an interesting adventure that took all day, and 'how the story ends' was too good not to share. You have got some options when it comes to what virtualization software you want to use. Parallels works best for Mac and has a paid version. VMWare Workstation and Player are pretty good for Windows and have paid versions as well. But my choice was to go with VirtualBox because it was opensource and free, and seemed to have lots of community documentation around it, and is known to work great with Vagrant to spin up development environments.

I downloaded the latest version of VirtualBox, but it would not install. The installation almost reached 100% completion, but then rolledback and would show a message saying Installation failed. Here is the ticket about it - https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11349

As suggested online, I tried installing older versions of VirtualBox - https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds. One of them did finish successful install but threw a nasty error when trying to run it.

Turns out this was a problem with Symantec Endpoint Protection being there on the system. SEP injects DLLs during various options and that was preventing VirutalBox to start. This link explained what was going on rather well - http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/creating-application-control-exclusions-symantec-endpoint-protection-121 and suggested an exception is added to the ADC to get past the problem. Right clicking on the VirtualBox icon gave me the program setup path to use for adding an exception but that did not make things work. Somewhere else online it was suggested that you do not just add an exception to SEP but disable Application and Device Control entirely. So I figured out a way to do that as well. Another one said I should upgrade my SEP to the latest version, so that was done, and it failed to solve the problem too. By the way, all the trial and error involved uninstalling Virtual Box, restarting the system and then installing Virtual Box again. I must have done this over 10 times.

Eventually I went to the IT team. Those that have been on the IT team for years dug up the same issues and their suggested solutions as I had and now we failed together to get Virtual Box working on my machine. It was then that this IT team intern, Nnekka decided to take things in her hand. She logged in into my machine with higher access > uninstalled Symantec Endpoint Protection all together (which you are not supposed to do) > installed Virtual Box and it worked! > re-installed SEP > and Virtual Box still continued to work.

That's how it is done! Now go, look at image on top of this post again.