Everything is now running on my new server, I have split up the server a bit now the websites that can be seen from the outside world now run on a virtual machine. This has its advantages, mainly when it comes to performing os updates, i can take a copy of the VM and test a version update to make sure that it will all update okay without having to worry about bricking the live server.
Obviously i am now in the position of having multiple webservers on my single internet IP, the best way to do this is to run a reverse proxy. I decided to setup Squid to do this. Squid runs on the physical server and recieves all traffic on port 80. It then takes this traffic and looks at the requested host, if its blog.arcath.net it sends it to the production vm, if its www.arcath.net it sends it to the rails vm etc… Another benefit of this is if im having a big problem with rails i can merely change the ip of the VM then everyone will get a squid error page (which i intend to shiny up), instead of me having to leave the server on so other websites can be used whilst one or more of the sites could be broken. I will be adding a post soon about how to setup a reverse proxy for http.
The Reverse proxy did cause some issues, mainly with wordpress. I was running 2.8.something which as it turns out didnt support reverse proxies! So i ended up installing a clean version of 2.9.2 which works fine. I still need to get the url re-writing to work but other than that its all working fine.
This server unlike whitefall is running Ubuntu Server, the reason im swapping to this is simple, i was fed up with coming across great programs and gems only to find that it or a dependancy is a PITA to install on arch. trainbbcode has swapped syntax highlighter a couple of times due to this problem, i got it working nice using a highlighter that uses textmate rules only to find that there was no way to get it working on arch…. i know its a gem for everyone to use but if i cant use it on my setup whats the point of using it?
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.