I was recently working on a Drupal project that had some internal DNS managed via hosts file. Tell me about it. Having no publicly accessible DNS or IP creates a challenge when your SaaS based Jenkins runs the tests.

The solution for this is a little custom work in your FeatureContext constructor and a BeforeScenario method.

And a little glue in the behat.yml to pass the custom hostHeader variable to the FeatureContext. Make sure that you're also setting the IP of the server for base_url and you're all set.

You can use this same pattern to pass around other variables from behat.yml to your FeatureContext.

Last weekend I gave my session at the second annual Capital Camp, as you may have gathered from my last blog post. It was really well attended, despite the attendance being down due to Metro track work. The session went really well, there were a lot of great questions and follow-ups. I'm still answering emails, actually.

I think this goes to show that not a lot of people are well-versed in what to do when faced with a DDoS. I hope that other people pick up the torch here and I'd be glad to help anyone that is interested. I also plan on advance-ifying the session for PNW or BadCamp.

Slides for OMG DDoS - Drupal lessons learned the hard way
Video for OMG DDoS - Drupal lessons learned the hard way

Modern web browsers put a cap on the number of connections they make to a host. This means if you've got a lot of assets on one hostname the browser will queue the remaining assets, while the ones in front download. This is referred to as blocking.

One way around blocking is to create multiple subdomains, for instance, assets0.davidstoline.com and assets1.davidstoline.com to increase the number of resources downloaded in parallel. This is method is called domain sharding and it is recommended by both Google's PageSpeed and Yahoo's YSlow.

I can't exactly afford a high quality CDN like Akamai but I can still leverage some of the benefits and fun of using a CDN. My friend Wim Leers wrote the Drupal CDN module, which you can leverage to do a little home grown sharding of your own.