Q: Our site has an issue/performance problem/needs consulting. What technical information do you need to help us with that?
A: In order to diagnose an issue, help with performance problems, or do other consultation, we need the following:
- Your server(s) must be running Linux, or a flavor of BSD.
- Your server(s) must have ssh installed and running. In certain cases where ssh is not available, we can help if you have cPanel installed.
- We can send you our ssh public key if required.
- We will need to know the URL(s) that show the problem(s).
- We will need the username for Drupal's user 1, and its password. If we have ssh access, we can change user 1's password ourselves temporarily and change it back when we are done.
- phpinfo. Create a file with the phpinfo() function in it, and we will check it remotely.
- Topology of your system, including how many servers, and what each does [web, db, reverse proxy, ...etc.]
Alternatively, you can create a copy of the site (a dump of the MySQL database, and a .tar.gz or .zip archive of all the Drupal files), put it on a server and give us the FTP/download information. We will then install it on our test server and diagnose/fix the problem(s) for you.
Notes:
- You can change your regular passwords temporarily (e.g. Linux root, and Drupal user 1), before we get access, and then you can change them back when we are done with the consulting engagement. This is not needed if you go with our ssh public key method.
- We cannot use proprietary VPNs that require Windows or Mac OS X. If your site requires such a non-standard setup, we will not be able to remotely access your system.
- If your server has Plesk, it may stand in the way of making changes to Apache, PHP and MySQL. So if these changes are needed to solve problems, we can recommend the changes, and you have your host implement them.
- We are sorry, but we prefer not to get involved with sites running on Windows servers for the time being.
