By adamg on

I've been building a Drupal site on a single server, but our whole site actually runs on a server farm (Apache 2 PHP 4 on all the servers with a MySQL box and a load balancer in font). Are there any gotchas we should watch out for when we replicate all the files around the farm? http://drupal.org/node/view/1367 seems to indicate there aren't, so my apologies if I'm asking an already answered question, but I wanted to make sure.

Thanks!

Comments

moshe weitzman’s picture

moshe weitzman commented

the only issue i can think of is that you have to specify an absolute path for your file uploads or else they will appear on whatever web server the user happens to be using.

Dublin Drupaller’s picture

Dublin Drupaller commented

I just installed drupal.org on my "server", which has a similar spec to yours. Had major issues with the htaccess file and couldn't get it to work with it. have removed htaccess and it works, albeit with a few errors now and again when accessing index.php....such as when I log out or sometimes when I try to access index.php it starts a "file downloading" routine as opposed to opening the file itself.

did you have similar problems?

Would be curious to hear your experience.

Don't really understand what you mean when you talk about "replicate files around the farm". What do you mean?

(am a newbie)

Jason

Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate

adamg’s picture

adamg commented

Haven't had .htaccess problems, but that's probably because, like you, I'm not using it (for some reason in our setup, using it requires root access, which I don't have) - well, it's there in the directory, but I don't have clean URLs turned on. I'm also not using the file uploads, so that hasn't been an issue.

So far, so good! The only problem I've run into is something that's probably unique to our setup: For some security reason, only one of the servers in our farm is allowed to send traffic to the outside world. Since one of the main reasons I'm using Drupal right now is for its RSS aggregator, this caused some problems with the conf.php - if I set it for our "public" URL, the aggregator couldn't go get RSS feeds (unless, by luck, the wget launched by cron.php happened to land on the right server). Solution: Set up a second instance of Drupal in another directory pointing to the internal IP number of that server and run cron.php there. A bit clunky, but it works.

As for replication, the way our system works: We have one "master" server in the farm. Every five minutes, some software on that box checks for new/changed files and then distributes them to all the other servers in the farm. We first tested Drupal in a directory that wasn't replicated, just to make sure nothing odd would happen (we're all new to PHP) - yay, nothing did!

Dublin Drupaller’s picture

Dublin Drupaller commented

Heya Adam..

Cheers for coming back to me and interesting to hear about the farming thing. I think i understand.

Quick question re: the .htaccess issues...did you try searching for a fix or a workaround and gave up after spending hours on drupal.org trawling through the posts and referring posts that the search engine kicks back up for .htaccess (oops! there's another one!) search strings.

The reason I ask is because I'm spending as much spare time as possible to hunt down a fix/workaround. I have been toying with drupalk for over a week now...and would be ideal for my own hobby site. Even though I love the flexibility and architecture of drupal, it would be pointless for me to start building the site proper with out an understanding that people will be able to access it.

That is...unless I take up a different hobby...i.e.programming php script and htaccess files...and servers...

Anyway, would be curious to know if you tried and gave up or are in the kow that no fix or workaround exists or can possibly work? you sound a lot more experienced than me, would appreciate your opininon.

Jason

Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate

adamg’s picture

adamg commented

I really only know enough to be a menace to myself and those around me :-). .htaccess has always been a special case here, so I've pretty much learned to do without it, so I'm of no help here, sorry.

mstrugar’s picture

mstrugar commented

Is anyone aware of a blogger api solution that would add the google toolbar "create a blog post" feature to IE 6 and allow for drupal blog posting from any page and/or browser?

Matt Strugar-Fritsch

batghare’s picture

batghare commented

We have requirement of setting up server farm and we would like users to uplaod images/files and want them to be shared on different servers. What are steps to do this. Can you guys please share your experience, we are new to drupal.