Slashdot Mirror
Efficient HTML Organization and Distribution on Webservers?
rasjani asks: "I recently started working as sysadmin. First major thing i want to rearrange is page distribution. Currently we are using rsync over ssh to copy the stuff to production servers and no backlog of any kind. I would like to implement CVS (or the like) into this scheme, so that if the NOC notices that something is broken in the web, they can do a rollback from CVS if the webmasters or editors aren't around to fix the problem. So people, do you have any thoughts how to implement this? Has anyone done something similar and willing to share their experiences? What gotchas might I stumble upon? Should I still use rsync/ssh for file distribution and add the check-in for a few scripts or should I just make a cron job in production servers to poll CVS for updated material?"
I am not sure exactly how it works, but I know for a fact www.gnome.org and news.gnome.org are done from cvs.
Why not email the webmasters and get all the help you need.
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
To set up CVS over SSH, use the following environment variables:
and set up CVS to use RSA Authentication (/etc/ssh/sshd_config)
plus similar for SSH2. This requires that each user and each host have its public SSH key on the CVS server, in their home directory and
Finally, there's some work on implementing SSL/TLS directly into the CVS server, to eliminate the need to provide local user accounts on the server. This should dramatically increase the security of the repositories since it allows them to be turned into closed systems without user shell access. In the most likely scenario, CVS will be able to function much like SSH - you can operate in anonymous mode, or you can require PKI authentication of either or both parties.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
We thought about doing something like this, but found that CVS was overkill for our purposes. We didn't get past the stage where we determined that we didn't actually NEED every old version of our files, just something backed up so we could fall back if we needed to.
So we set up a staging server to which the developers have access, and only the sysadmins have access to the functions to move over files to production. This allows us to keep development separate from production, in addition to providing two sets of backups (one prod, one dev).
The next stage of this is to set up a box with lots of HD space, so we can keep "hot" backups of the html back through the days. We figured out that the backups for the various web servers would come to something like 9GB/wk. The boxes we eventually went with are attached to NAS boxes with 240GB each (mirrored, so functionally 120GB, which lets us keep roughly 3 months of backups on a hard drive, as opposed to tape.
Note that you could easily set up a *nix box with 300GB of space relatively cheaply. The processor and memory requirements are going to be practically nil, so we figured that it would be about $1200 for the box. This is beige boxed, which my boss threw out since we couldn't get HW support, so our system cost significantly more.
When we need to restore older files, we can just load up the old tar.gz, copy the files as needed, and we're outta there. No worries about tape drive screwups, and so on.
Hope this helps.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Check here:Using CVS to manage a website