Example Site
Normally, we would construct an example site to illustrate our
points, but in the case of mod_backhand,
it’s rather difficult to do so without using several
machines. So, instead, our example will be from a live site that one
of the authors (BL) runs, FreeBMD, which is a world-wide volunteer
effort to transcribe the Birth, Marriage, and Death Index for England
and Wales, currently comprising over 3,000 volunteers. You can see
FreeBMD at http://www.freebmd.org.uk/ if you are
interested. At the time of writing, FreeBMD was load-balanced across
three machines, each with 250 GB of RAID disk, 2 GB of RAM, and
around 25 million records in a MySQL database. Users upload and
modify files on the machines, from which the database is built, and
for that reason the configuration is nontrivial: the files must live
on a “master” machine to maintain
consistency easily. This means that part of the site has to be
load-balanced. Anyway, we will present the configuration file for one
of these machines with interleaved comments following the line(s) to
which they refer.
HostnameLookups off
This speeds up logging.
User webserv Group webserv
Just the usual deal, setting a user for the web server.
ServerName liberty.thebunker.net
The three machines are called liberty, fraternity, and equality — clearly, this line is different on each machine.
CoreDumpDirectory /tmp
For diagnostic purposes, we may need to see core dumps: Note that /tmp would not be a good choice on a shared machine — since it is ...
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