Hi,

First off, great initiative. By chance a module like this was exactly what I was looking for and I am very happy with the approach in regards to the end-user friendliness.

I noticed an open issue regarding shared hosting websites and their presence in the network manager module. I am not sure if this is why I don't see any of my websites showing up in the network manager. Their database do live on the same server, I am on shared hosting but as a reseller.

Perhaps I'm just overlooking something, I could not find a way to manually add a website to the network manager. I have the version 1.4 installed on the website that is supposed to monitor AND on a website that has to be monitored. Both only find themselves. Running cron did not change this.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

btopro’s picture

btopro commented

Thanks for the encouragement. One issue might be that even though the database is on the same server, you'll need the user of each site to have access to the others. Are you able to setup a DB user that can read across all of them? You'll need 1 db user that can read across all of them. I'm very interested in making this stuff work for people across servers / environments (especially in shared setups) but the implementation needs to be simple and intuitive or people won't continue adoption at the rate we've seen thus far.

btopro’s picture

btopro commented
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)
alfthecat’s picture

alfthecat commented

Hi,

I have given it some thought and also tinkered with a few scenario's. On the aforementioned shared hosting account, no dbase username can be the same since a prefix is automaticaly created. For instance, for every username, a database carries the name of username_*** where *** is a custimizable manual input and username_ is relative to the username of the hosting account.

I understand it is a difficult thing to get the network manager to work on shared accounts. I do have a suggestion though, from an end-user perspective. I think the most intuitive way of working with this module is to maintain the method of installing Network Manager on the one side, and a module for every webiste in the network that acts as a communicator. The approach you used in the previous version. I think that approach is actually more user friendly even though it is not the most efficient. This way the mechanism is more intuitive (at least that's how I experience it). It appears more logical to install small 'connector modules' in the websites contained in a network. This way, if the network manager doesn't find other websites you can at least be confident you have made sure it should be able to establish a connection and you can rule out any malfunction.

Also, I reason, by using a module for websites contained in a network, there should be some way of granting access to the database even on different hosts. Although I am speculating off course.

Again, I really appreciate the effort and this module in all, I hope my thoughts are of some use. I look forward to the day I can use it on my network. If there is anything I can assist in please let me know.

btopro’s picture

btopro commented

I agree with you that turning something small on is a bit more intuitive but if there were ever changes to that module that required updates (quite possible given some of the feature ideas floating around) it would be a total pain to run around updating 10 sites let alone 100's. This was partly because it was request and partly because I'm managing 40+ with the network manager internally so it helped a lot when adding new sites every day or so.

As for the shared hosting. There is a solution but it's not really one that people would like bc it would involve adding connection information manually. Here's something I could see though that is somewhat reasonable:

  • Turn on network manager
  • add other sites manually to the settings.php of the site running network manager of the form $db_url['default'] = 'mysqli:' (with connection info)
  • Network manager is rewritten slightly to additionally scan databases in the site's definition in the global $db_url var
  • they now show up in lists / elsewhere with some kind of distinction as to which server they are on (and have the option to display that in the network manager overview page)

    • Any thoughts on this idea? This is something I've considered for the Drupal7 roadmap already since the whole sites thing is being rewritten. It still wouldn't be an issue connecting across D5 and D6 sites (or shouldn't be at least) because it would still be in a structured way. I'd basically just be using the connection info so that I have a value user / pass / server / db to connect to and get stats from.

    alfthecat’s picture

    alfthecat commented

    Hi btpro, sorry for the late reply.

    I agree with the update problem if a 'connector module' is used on large number of websites. I can see the problem with that.

    I love the thought of manually adding connection info. I figure it makes most sense that one would generally use one of the websites in a network to operate network manager. If it would be possible to enter the user / pass / server / db values via a simple, straigt forward UI you'd still get the intuitive logic and it would suffice to have just one website accessing all the others.

    If the database table that contains the connection values can be easily excluded in the quite popular Backup & Migrate module, you would also have the option for users that frequently duplicate a database as a starting point for setting up new websites to exclude the possibly sensitive connection info of pre-existing websites.

    I will tinker with the settings.php file and try to have network manager to connect to several other ones over the weekend. I'm excited to see how it works out.

    --Update--

    I just tried adding database info to my settings.php file. I tried adding a database to it from a different website. Funny thing is that the website I added got damaged, as it seemed. It didn't display its theme anymore and seemed to have lost it's references to its stylesheets. I had to restore is from a backup, even after I returned the settings.php file to the original state. I'm actually quite puzzled by this...

    What I did is this:

    1 Added the connection info of 'website 2' to the settings.php of 'website 1' and used ['default'] for website 2 (otherwise, website 1 would use the dbase of website 2)

    2 In website 2, I made sure I had the Network Manager settings configured correctly

    Can you detect what I did wrong?

    btopro’s picture

    btopro commented

    Not sure, there's nothing in the network manager that physically changes info on other sites, it simply reads them. Only thing I could think of is that you switched from 1 DB to the other and cache data got fudged. OR, that you switched from querying DB1 over to DB2 and didn't set it back so some stuff got executed on the first and some on the second. Not sure, I don't do anything write capable in the network manager module but in my internal version I use a central site to write roles and change other info on "remote" sites all the time w.o. issue.

    alfthecat’s picture

    alfthecat commented

    Allright, thanks, I'm suspecting a cache issue of some sort. I'm gonna keep at it :)

    inders’s picture

    inders commented
    Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Closed (duplicate)

    Hi,

    I agree with btopto.
    see:-
    http://drupal.org/node/584620

    Thanks
    -Inder Singh
    http://indersingh.com

    alfthecat’s picture

    alfthecat commented

    Yeah, well, any way to have Network Manager work on my shared hosted websites would already make my day. I'd still appreciate a GUI for this in the future but off course I understand that all depends on the type of end user this module is aimed at.

    The functionalities that Network Manager brings to Drupal are great and even though I've not been able to thoroughly use it I love it already :)