A reminder to myself and a warning to others...

Had a problem recently with a new VPS server.  It was a fairly standard, entry level affair, using Parallels and Plesk.  It was serving a Drupal site, though hardly a very high traffic one.  Yet it was regularly failing - the Apache processes would just get killed, quite often along with the monitoring program I installed to try to figure out what was happening (monit), and sometimes the Plesk control panel services.

Over here: Lesson 3: You want a web portfolio? For a programmer?":

Some time ago, I had a client requirement for continuous live testing of an online application process. It was a multi-step application for insurance, so it had a lot of server-side logic, as well as plenty of client-side javascript validation. Obviously, the best way to test this is to simulate a real browser session. This way you can detect obscure errors such as javascript validation errors stopping form submissions - things that would not show up in standard unit testing.

A combination of two things recently combined to make me change the way I use FTP.

Firstly, I had started to use SmartFTP, but they stopped offering a free version and I was unwilling to upgrade to a product that seemed to have a very frequent upgrade cycle, with the newest version subtly altering the way you were used to working with it.

Secondly, I have lately needed to work with more Linux-based web servers than usual, which offer SSH access, and some of which block standard FTP access.

I've moved this article at nmglc.co.uk/content/overriding-drupals-mail-function.  It outlines a quick way to override Drupal's default mail function() with your own.  It came in handy when I was trying to send email from a Drupal site hosted on my ISP's shared server and fell foul of a security requirement that PHP calls to mail() had to include extra header arguments.