Re: CGIDEV2 question

[web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> Well, cough, in the M$ world I would use it to route traffic to a different
> servers (one app one server approach).

True, but in that case you're using a separate IP address for each domain 
name instead of a different port. That should work with different 
instances too. Just have each instance bind to a different IP address.

Of course, IP addresses can be expensive (if they're all publicly 
available) but it's an idea.

> Anything that is customer facing I would never have them see ports in the
> URL (if I could help it).  Reason is I can almost guarantee if you have your
> app at http://myserver.com:8080/MyApp they will many times go to
> http://myserver.com/MyApp.

Absolutely true.

> That's one of the beauties of sub domains (DNS experts correct me if I am
> wrong). They are abstracted up to your DNS server instead of a single
> machine. So you can have http://sub1.domain.com point to a different machine
> than http://sub2.domain.com.

Okay, but we weren't talking about splitting the HTTP server tasks across 
different machines, were we?  The OP has multiple servers running on one 
machine, but doesn't want to have to specify the port number in his URLs.


> The site that my http://mowyourlawn.com website is on hosts about 30+ small
> fairly static domains and each domain has it's own "child" Apache
> virtualhost configuration file that is governed from a main "parent" Apache
> configuration file.

That's usually done by a /COPY (to use the RPG terminilogy) type of thing. 
You can include other files from the main one.  But you still risk a 
directive in the sub-file screwing up the main one.  Plus, you have to 
take the main server down to re-load the configuration.

> I don't know if I answered your question or not, but hopefully you know 
> more of where I am coming from.

Yes, I understand where you're coming from.

I, actually, come from a similar point of view.  I've been working with 
Apache running under FreeBSD for far longer than it has existed on the 
iSeries. One of the most popular uses for FreeBSD is running Web servers. 
Some of the biggest Web sites in the world (Yahoo, for example) are run on 
FreeBSD.  So web serving is a big deal in that community.

I participate in FreeBSD forums as well as iSeries ones.  In the FreeBSD 
arena, you _never_ hear of people running more than one server instance. 
Okay, maybe "never" is a little strong, but it's extremely unusual.

Yet, it seems like just about every single iSeries shop does it.

I've always thought that was peculiar. I've asked iSeries people many 
times, "Why do you want to run this under a separate instnace?  Why not 
just run it under the main instance?"  To me, coming from my background, 
it has always seemed very bizarre that people run lots of instances 
instead of just one main one.

The answer that I've received, every time I've asked this, was that they 
wanted an instance that they could monkey around with.  They wanted to be 
able to play with different settings and take the server up and down 
without any risk of messing up the main server.

This never happens in FreeBSD or Windows systems because people who want 
to play and test will just set up their own server on their own computer 
(the one they use as a desktop, or whatever) and then they won't have to 
worry about messing anyone else up.  But on the iSeries, companies usually 
can't afford a separate system for every developer.  They'll have one test 
system that has to be shared by many developers.  So, for testing, people 
set up their own instances instead of separate servers.

That's why your answer didn't make sense at first.  DNS only controls 
which IP address you get when you look up a name.  It doesn't switch to 
different instances.  Sure, you can run lots of virtual hosts under one 
instance, but that doesn't provide the same level of insulation against 
messing up the server.

But, what didn't occur to me in that last message, is that you could 
potentially run different instances under different IP addresses instead 
of different port numbers.  That would work.