This is a first longish article in what is to be a longish series of articles on how working stiffs can have their very own Drupal development server, with all the tools they need to develop, test and deploy and monitor their Drupal projects, for free. As such it is techie but only enough to get the job done.
Drupal site monitoring (site up? new versions or releases need to be installed, especially security releases? etc., etc.) will be integrated into the Project Flow and Tracker Drupal development framework installation profile (the heart of the development server) via Nagios, so that when you start a project, the associated test site can be monitored as you work, whether local or remote.
Sign up for a free account and test out Project Flow & Tracker (still in alpha but perfectly usable, check out the podcast on how to set up a project): http://projectflowandtracker.com/
See Project Flow & Tracker DrupalConDC 2009 session proposal here: http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/project-flow-and-tracker-business-objects-and-user-stories-test-driven-drupal-based-website-
Track Project Flow & Tracker development progress here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/16850
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