DestroyTwitter, Drupal Essential Modules, and more!

I've been wanting to discuss some of the utilities that I have been using here as of late and give a little feed back on them.  Featured in this particular article is DestroyTwitter an Adobe Air twitter client that rivals twirl and is much cleaner to work with than twirl.  I will also be discussing some of the core Drupal modules that I have found to be almost essential in every Drupal site that I have been working on recently.  NovaNET-WEB v10 Beta 3 was released not too long ago and I will be doing a short synopsis of the overall state of the server and client.   Lastly I will be discussing a utility that has basically made my sysadmin life 100% easier since implementing and that is haproxy

DestroyTwitter

First off, I want to say that I was a huge twirl supporter and loved how sleek and well it worked, but now that I have been using DestroyTwitter for the past week and half it absolutely blows twirl away.  Here is the brief from the DestroyTwitter website

[quote]DestroyTwitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets current and up-to-date using notifications that appear immediately after a new tweet arrives. DestroyTwitter also features complete direct messaging functionality. Messages and tweets can be replied to with the original visible for quick and easy reference. A search function is also available to track anything that's being talked about.[/quote]

If you are a twitter user, I highly reccommend using DestroyTwitter.  It will grow on you exponentially as its very well put together and feature rich and just works with no hiccups.

Essential Drupal Modules

As many of you that know me personally know that I'm very impressed and enjoy working with the Drupal CMS environment.  The more I work with it the finer tuned I seem to become in how I like to administer my drupal instance.  Here are the current modules that I don't work without basically.

PathAuto
CCK (Content Construction Kit)
Panels2
Views2
Webform
Contemplate -
WYSIWYG
RootCandy Admin Theme

I'm not going to go into these modules too indepthly right now as I'm in the process of writing a large Drupal article that discusses each of these as well as gives some instruction on how to use them.....

NovaNET-WEB v10 Beta 3

As many of you know I used to work at NovaStor and this release of NovaNET-WEB is something that has been wanted for a very long time from all of the NovaNET-WEB service providers as well as many people that are looking for an all inclusive backup solution of Local Backup (DVD, External HDD, NAS, Tape) Online Backup, and Full Disaster Recovery functionality.

Client side

Pros

• Scheduling engine is corrected.  It is no longer using the Windows Task Scheduler which ended up not working out as well as thought
• no more file count limitation.  Performed a 5 million file backup in sub 18 hours with the beta 3 client
• much more customizable
• ability to have multiple backup severs configured for the option to have redundant backup control
• Near-CDP capabilities (Schedules down to the minute)
• Cleaner and easier to use interface
• better laid out log files
• Exchange 2007 and SQL 2008 support

Cons

• Advanced functionality is buried into a ini file deep inside documents and settings instead of being exposed in the GUI in the "advanced mode"
• Backup Settings are not very clear (the "auto-detect" backup setting isn't as apparent as it was previously"
• fat client install weight aprox 180mb installed
• Lost a lot of the NovaNET-WEB feel to the application
• No non-microsoft application support
• No multi-platform support (OSX or Linux)
• No brick level backup of Exchange
• No Data Dedupe

Server Side

Pros

• Windows 2008 Support
• no more user.apf as it's stored in the SQL Database
• MySQL backend support
• Better Roll-Up capabilities

Cons

• User APF stored in the SQL Database... this is going require a dedicated optimized SQL server
• backupserver.ini is not fully documented
• Configuration manager still hasn't changed
• Performance Counters only work for 32bit OS
• still only 32bit memory footprint support so it cannot leverage more than 3gb of RAM
• still has storage thrashing issues on the storage side
• still requires block level replication to secure user data
• No Centralized Log Management or Report generation
• No update to the configuration manager UI
• Still only supports Windows Server
• No updates done to the Active Directory Authentication logic to leverage non-2000 authentication
• Not as scalable due to the SQL Server requirements
• No Data Depude options
• Lack of administration documentation
• Upgrade installation doesn't work from 7.1.39.0
• Database migration from 7.1 never worked, and there is no manual way of doing this
• No webservice API for "file put" or "file gets"

Client Side observations were very positive as there were some points that have always plagued NNW for many years finally corrected.  There is a ton of functionality built into this release as it completely leverages the NovaBACKUP framework which was an amazing route for the client to take.  The scheduling aspect of the client has completely been resolved from my assessments.   Client upgrades thus far worked well from 7.1.31.0.  I'm very impressed on the client side thus far.

Server side I wasn't very impressed once I couldn't get the server to install on any of the servers that I had tried installing it on where the only thing that has been installed is NovaNET-WEB Backup server and Windows.  The issue of removing the necessicity of protecting the fragile user.apf file for the User Storage was a very practical step for increasing the ability to scale the backup server environment to better utilize hardware resources, but now it is going to require a very optimized SQL server environment to keep the solution efficient.  The lack of having the ability to utilize more than 3gb of memory is a big kick in my eyes as well as the performance counters not working for 64bit OS's.

All in all this is a huge step for NovaNET-WEB, I just wish they would have focused more on ability to scale the backup server as much as they did the client in handling larger file counts correctly.

 Quick Resources:

Official NovaNET-WEB v10 Beta Release Notes (must register to view)

NovaNET-WEB Licensing Information