Installing Drupal

I've had a number of people ask for help installing or upgrading D7. I'm creating this post to hold all questions and help so that everyone can benefit.

If you haven't tried IRC yet, please do. I'm usually on there (davidneedham) if anyone prefers to ping me.

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David Needham, Chapter Three
"Your Drupal experts in San Francisco"

Hi all,

I tried to install drupal 7 to my universtiy space,

The website domain is www.cs.ucc.ie/~ag10

But it failed with access forbidden error, anyone knows how to solve it ?

Thanks for the help.

Hi,

Currently we are running Drupal 6 at IIS. But it seems slow. ( We have about 15000 users )

We are looking to move to Linux server.

I would be really grateful if you could suggest me specifications for a fast Linux server ( dedicated ).

I am not familiar with Linux server management. Is there any GUI ( Admin interface like IIS ) available for Linux?

Kind Regards,
David

david1982@live.co.uk

how can i downgrade drupal basic setup from 6.20 to 6.3

I am learning Drupal. I used Lynda.com tutorials to install WAMP and Drupal 6.2 onto my own PC. When I go to set up and test new accounts with a user name and e-mail address, I get the message

warning: mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 550 bosauthsmtp12: Host 00.000.000.000: No unauthenticated relaying permitted in C:\wamp\www\drupal\includes\mail.inc on line 193.
Unable to send e-mail. Please contact the site administrator if the problem persists.

I did look for answers to this situation on several sites, but it wasn't getting me anywhere.

I am just learning Drupal because it seems like the best solution to the problem I am trying to solve. I have a good idea of what I want and a basic understanding of how to use Drupal to build it, but I have some concerns about the best approach to take.

Here's what I need to build as well as my concerns:
-A series of at least 50 (and possibly hundreds of) separate websites
-Traffic will be very low at each site because users will rarely be logging in
-I don't want ANY content indexed by search engines
-Each site will have a separate user base and ALL content will require authentication to view
-Some of the sites may REQUIRE all users' email addresses to be from the same domain, while some sites will not enforce this.
-Some or all of these sites will have administrators, but I will have to admin them all to some degree so I want an approach that makes admining this many sites as efficient as possible
-Ideally I need a way to create new sites based on a few different templates or another existing site, then customize it by adding users and changing some content.
-Some content will be reused/shared among the sites, but all will have their own exclusive content and some may have special features as well
-Users will log in using one of the following URLs: clientname.mydomain.com, service.clientname.com, www.mydomain.com
-Site will then be served from a similar URL