[aklug] apache server and nfs mounted home directories

The infrastructure where I work is beginning to show some cracks. When I
got here, the file server and the web server were the same machine. It
ran nfs and users got nfs-mounted home directories on their office
workstations. So all they had to do was create files in the public_html
directory in their home directory and it'd be on the web.

Of course, eventually, we wanted to seperate thos two functions. Neither
the file server or the web server are trivial setups any more. We have a
bunch of web apps now and it seems wrong to have the web server on this
machine we are counting on for both security and stability. We built a
web server and right now apache is accessing people's public_html space
by auto-mounting their home dirs via nfs just like the workstations.

So if a request comes in for ~john/, the web server automounts
/home/john via nfs from the file server and serves up my home page from
the public_html directory.

I dunno... It works but I don't really like it. All this nfs mounting
and sending files over the local network just so they can be sent out
over the internet.

Any better ideas? We probably have plenty of disk space on the web
server. I was thinking of rsyncing all the public_html directories every
15 minutes or so from the file server to the web server. The users would
just have to get used to waiting like 15 minutes (tops) for their
changes to show up. We could also write a script to allow them to
publish themselves. Like if you didn't want to wait 15 minutes, you
could run this script. The major drawback is that a lot of users aren't
going to be able to understand how to preview their changes by pointing
a browser at their home directory instead of at the web server.

Maybe I could go back to running a web server on the file server but
just for home pages. Or maybe I should leave it the way it is.

-- 
John Heim
email: john@johnheim.com  skype: john.g.heim
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