[webdev] Re: [aclug-L] [announce] webdev project

[Jonathan Hall <jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > On web server, we should probably designate a subcommittee to
> > research that and
> > come up with recommendations. I think we want to colocate, we
> > want root access,
> > a clean slate for whatever software we want, as much bandwidth as
> > possible, and
> > physical access when necessary. Someone needs to sign up to
> > figure that out.
> 
> I have a thought on the physical placement of the web server.  There's no
> reason why we couldn't place different parts of our website on different
> servers.  We wouldn't require as much bandwith, and we'd build in some
> redundancy.  We could round-robin DNS for which one presented the homepage,
> and links from there would go to the individual machines at aclug.org. I
> don't know whether this can be done with our current software or not.

Using a caching proxy on multiple machines, this can be done with
practically any software.  It work something like this:

Set up one "master" server running whatever software you want.  Possibly
multiple "master" servers, if different web platforms are needed/wanted (one
for Zope, one for OpenACS, one for static HTML, one for FrontPage Server,
etc, etc :)

Then set up as many "mirror" servers as desired.

Then set up multiple A records, one for each "public" server (You may or may
not want the 'master' server to be accessed by the public, depending on your
needs).  Suppose the master server is 192.168.1.1, and we have three
"mirror" servers, 192.168.1.2, 172.16.16.50, and 10.128.128.100:

$ host www.aclug.org
www.aclug.org           A       192.168.1.2
www.aclug.org           A       172.16.16.50
www.aclug.org           A       10.128.128.100

On each of the mirror servers, set up a caching proxy (squid can be
configured to work this way, I know, although I've never configured it to
mimic a server).  When a person connects to any one of the "mirror" servers,
if the server has the page they request cached, it will display it from its
cache.  If the mirror server does not have the page cached, it will then
fetch it from the mirror server, then send it to the requesting client.

With this setup it is (at least in theory) very easy to distribute the
bandwidth usage over multiple networks.  The down side is that there is no
way to give presidence to certian (faster/more reliable) "mirror" servers
this way.  Perhaps there is an alternate DNS server, or a patch to bind that
would allow something like that?


Now, having said all that, I think we have enough high-bandwidth access that
this really won't be necessary.  :)  We have a number of members who work
for ISPs... at least one of them has offered to do some hosting for us
(details remain unknown).  And we may have access to WSU's network.  In
either case, redundancy (for the purpose of bandwidth) will probably not be
necessary.



--
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  Jonathan Hall  *  jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx  *  PGP public key available
 Systems Admin, Future Internet Services; Goessel, KS * (620) 367-2487
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