I know there are places that do this and I'd like to figure out how to implement it. Most ISPs I know will have a dedicated web server and dedicated user server (amongst other services.) My guess here is that they do an NFS mount of say /var/www onto the user server and then symlink each ~user/public_html to /var/www/~user. However, how do you handle permissions? How do you set it up so that each user can modify their own files on /var/www/~user without a) getting a permission denied because of how the mount was originally mounted, and b) without being able to affect someone else's files. NFS/LDAP across the servers?
Next question: how do you deal with instances where the web server might've gone down for whatever reason? What will happen with the user server having that stale NFS mount? Anyone attempting to access their files will cause things to hang up. Also, how to do deal with the chance of both machines having gone down, then coming back up and the users machine trying to mount the www one, while www isn't fully up and running yet? I think the NFS mount will fail in that instance, but then what? autofs?
What else am I overlooking?
-- W | I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere. +-------------------------------------------------------------------- Ashley M. Kirchner <mailto:ashley@xxxxxxxxxx> . 303.442.6410 x130 IT Director / SysAdmin / Websmith . 800.441.3873 x130 Photo Craft Laboratories, Inc. . 3550 Arapahoe Ave. #6 http://www.pcraft.com ..... . . . Boulder, CO 80303, U.S.A.
