Midwestern Mac, LLC

I've begun working a lot more with Drupal multisites, as doing so saves a lot of time in certain situations (usually, when you have a large group of sites that use the same kinds of Drupal modules, but need to have separate databases and front-end information.

One problem I've finally overcome is the use of actual domain host names for development (i.e. typing in dev.example.com instead of localhost to get to a site). This is important when doing multisite work, as it lets you use Drupal's built-in multisite capabilities without having to hack your way around using the http://localhost/ url.

Here's what I did to use dev.example.com to access a dev.example.com multisite in a Drupal installation using MAMP (the dev.example.com folder is located within Drupal's /sites/ folder):

Recently, during one job for a client, I needed to work for a length of time in a location that had quite severe network restrictions—in addition to a proxy server, the location blocked every port besides 80, 25, 443, and 8080. In order to use secure shell (SSH) to login to my work web server, I needed to use one of those ports (I used nmap to find open ports on my end).

Luckily, I gained access to another network for a short time, and used that connection to update my work web server to allow SSH over port 8080 (in addition to the standard, port 22). I edited the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file so it reads:

Port 22
Port 8080

(the Port 22 line was commented out, originally).

Then I simply used the -p (port) directive when logging in via SSH:

$ ssh -p8080 username@example.com