Thursday, July 28, 2005

MySQL, PHP sessions and multiple machines

Following on from our previous experiments, we realised that the problem with running a web-based service (such as the Horde webmail client) across multiple servers is maintaining session information between the machines.

PHP's default session handling functions make use of flat files stored on a local disk. PHP, however, provides a way to over-ride this with user-defined functions. In other words it's possible to plug your own session handling routines into PHP's session handler.

posted by guy at: 08:56 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

TLS/SSL certificates and multiple A records

We're in the process of migrating from our current server-oriented approach of handling services to a more generic services-based approach. The idea is instead of dedicating one machine to running a particular service, we'll dedicate a cluster of identical machines to running all services. One of the services that's earmarked to move is our outgoing mail server. As we allow users to establish a TLS/SSL connection to this server, we had some concerns about how to handle TLS/SSL certificates on our cluster. Do we need one certificate for the whole cluster or does each machine need a certificate?

posted by guy at: 08:32 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Firefox Extensions

This post is really just to remind me what extensions I've got installed in Firefox. This is what suits me:

Googlebar: Provide a Google search interface that includes useful things like a "site search" button and word highlighting.
Bookmarks Synchronizer: Many browsers on many machines, one set of bookmarks
Live HTTP Headers: Want to know what web server that remote site is running, or why your redirect doesn't work. Useful to webmasters and the like.
SwitchProxy Tool: Quickly and easily change proxy configurations. Good for testing that individual proxies in a cluster are behaving properly.
HTML Validator: Validate the HTML code in a page when you view source. Particularly useful for validating dynamic code if you're a web developer.
Tabbrowser Preferences: Make tabbed browsing work right
BugMeNot: Auto complete those stupid "sign up for a free account just so you can view this PDF" forms.

YMMV and all that.

posted by guy at: 14:35 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Festival is here again.

Village Green

A festival tradition. Lunch on the hay bales

posted by at: 14:19 SAST | path: /phone | permanent link