Virtual Domain Server Changes...

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Because of a number of you have expressed concerns over the reliability of
the virtual domain server; I have made some changes to improve that
reliability. 

     While the outage the day before yesterday was caused by a denial of
service attack, was unpreventable an really indefensible because of the nature
of the attack, this was the exception.

     The majority of the outages have been caused by the fact that the main web
server, www, has been unstable and the virtual domain server was dependent upon
it for some of it's functionality; most notably:

	logging
	cgi-bin files
	counter data files
	cgi-data files

     So when the main web server would die, the virtual domain server would
grind to a halt becuase it couldn't log, couldn't access system cgi-binaries,
or couldn't access data files that those binaries used. 

     In order to correct this problem I have changed the configuration so that
the logging is local on that machine rather than logging to space on www via
NFS (networked file system) mounts.  And I've made local copies of cgi-bin,
/usr/local/lib/counter and /usr/local/lib/cgi-data.  Now www2 is no longer
dependent upon www for anything critical and should continue to function
regardless of the state of www. 

     These changes do have some impacts in the way things work.

     For users; your counter data and your guestbook will now be independent
for your virtual domain verses your www.eskimo.com/~user address.  That is to
say that hits to www.eskimo.com/~user will only bump the counter for that
address, and hits to your virtual domain will only bump the counter for that
virtual domain.  They are seperate data files now and so in effect seperate
counters.  The same is true for your guestbook. 

     Erik, and anybody else making changes to system CGI's, it will now be
necessary to modify both copies, those that reside on www and www2. 

     There are still a few dependencies on www that will cause problems if it
stays down long enough (home page), but I am working on removing those.