Dedicated service servers

Ashley M. Kirchner ashley at pcraft.com
Mon Jan 17 18:12:13 UTC 2005


    I know there are places that do this and I'd like to figure out how 
to implement it.  Most ISPs I know will have a dedicated web server and 
dedicated user server (amongst other services.)  My guess here is that 
they do an NFS mount of say /var/www onto the user server and then 
symlink each ~user/public_html to /var/www/~user.  However, how do you 
handle permissions?  How do you set it up so that each user can modify 
their own files on /var/www/~user without a) getting a permission denied 
because of how the mount was originally mounted, and b) without being 
able to affect someone else's files.  NFS/LDAP across the servers?

    Next question: how do you deal with instances where the web server 
might've gone down for whatever reason?  What will happen with the user 
server having that stale NFS mount?  Anyone attempting to access their 
files will cause things to hang up.  Also, how to do deal with the 
chance of both machines having gone down, then coming back up and the 
users machine trying to mount the www one, while www isn't fully up and 
running yet?  I think the NFS mount will fail in that instance, but then 
what?  autofs?

    What else am I overlooking?

-- 
W | I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere.
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------
  Ashley M. Kirchner <mailto:ashley at pcraft.com>   .   303.442.6410 x130
  IT Director / SysAdmin / Websmith             .     800.441.3873 x130
  Photo Craft Laboratories, Inc.            .     3550 Arapahoe Ave. #6
  http://www.pcraft.com ..... .  .    .       Boulder, CO 80303, U.S.A.






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