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

["Dale W Hodge" <dwh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: webdev-bounce@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:webdev-bounce@xxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
> Of Jonathan Hall
> > 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 bandwidth, 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:

[snip a bunch of stuff]

> 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 precedence to certain (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?

What I was thinking of works a bit different. to use your example:


$ host www.aclug.org
www.aclug.org           CNAME ww1.aclug.org
www.aclug.org           CNAME ww2.aclug.org
www.aclug.org           CNAME   ww3.aclug.org

ww1.aclug.org           A       192.168.1.2
ww2.aclug.org           A       172.16.16.50
ww3.aclug.org           A       10.128.128.1

ww1, ww2 & ww3 would each have a copy of a static main page.  Links from there
would point to pages residing on the other servers.  Cnet.com is a good example.
Sometimes you stay at cnet.com other times you may move to computers.cnet.com or
download.cnet.com.  It lets you break out higher bandwidth stuff to the boxes
better suited to handle it.  It would also allow us to make certain features
available without compromising the entire Website.

Or, we could still break things out, but use 1 box for the main gateway without
using the round-robin DNS.


> 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.

In some ways, I'd like to try it "because we can". Linux is about innovation.
Why not consider some less conventional thinking?

--dwh

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Dale W Hodge - dwh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Secretary - info@xxxxxxxxx
Air Capital Linux User's Group  (ACLUG)
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