Hi folks
sorry for the lateness of reply on this one, was off on Holiday.
We have implemented a web cluster here at the MMU which covers failure of any machine in the
cluster. Load is balanced using a hardware switch using a number of identical web machines. Users
use a functionally identical (to the live boxes) web box for developing their pages and an in house
system to publish complete pages and sites to machines across the cluster. The secondary advantage
of this system is that users can therefore develop pages without compromising (though duff code for
instance) the external presence. The whole lot is handled with GPL based systems (Apache, PHP,
MySQL, SSH and Rsync) and some code to handle the interface and connectivity.
The benefits we have found are
a) We can down any machine for maintenance or whatever and still keep a presence
b) The sites can sustain a greater number of hits without degradation of performance
c) The users can develop in a 'safe' environment (see the point above regards secondary
advantage).
best wishes
Steve Nisbet
Web Technical Officer, Manchester Metropolitan University.
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