Re: CGIDEV2 question -- WEB400

Well, cough, in the M$ world I would use it to route traffic to a different
servers (one app one server approach).

True, but in that case you're using a separate IP address for each domainname instead of a different port. That should work with differentinstances too. Just have each instance bind to a different IP address.

Of course, IP addresses can be expensive (if they're all publiclyavailable) but it's an idea.

Anything that is customer facing I would never have them see ports in the
URL (if I could help it).  Reason is I can almost guarantee if you have your
app at http://myserver.com:8080/MyApp they will many times go to
http://myserver.com/MyApp.


Absolutely true.

That's one of the beauties of sub domains (DNS experts correct me if I am
wrong). They are abstracted up to your DNS server instead of a single
machine. So you can have http://sub1.domain.com point to a different machine
than http://sub2.domain.com.

Okay, but we weren't talking about splitting the HTTP server tasks acrossdifferent machines, were we? The OP has multiple servers running on onemachine, but doesn't want to have to specify the port number in his URLs.

The site that my http://mowyourlawn.com website is on hosts about 30+ small
fairly static domains and each domain has it's own "child" Apache
virtualhost configuration file that is governed from a main "parent" Apache
configuration file.

That's usually done by a /COPY (to use the RPG terminilogy) type of thing.You can include other files from the main one. But you still risk adirective in the sub-file screwing up the main one. Plus, you have totake the main server down to re-load the configuration.

I don't know if I answered your question or not, but hopefully you knowmore of where I am coming from.


Yes, I understand where you're coming from.

I, actually, come from a similar point of view. I've been working withApache running under FreeBSD for far longer than it has existed on theiSeries. One of the most popular uses for FreeBSD is running Web servers.Some of the biggest Web sites in the world (Yahoo, for example) are run onFreeBSD. So web serving is a big deal in that community.

I participate in FreeBSD forums as well as iSeries ones. In the FreeBSDarena, you _never_ hear of people running more than one server instance.Okay, maybe "never" is a little strong, but it's extremely unusual.


Yet, it seems like just about every single iSeries shop does it.

I've always thought that was peculiar. I've asked iSeries people manytimes, "Why do you want to run this under a separate instnace? Why notjust run it under the main instance?" To me, coming from my background,it has always seemed very bizarre that people run lots of instancesinstead of just one main one.

The answer that I've received, every time I've asked this, was that theywanted an instance that they could monkey around with. They wanted to beable to play with different settings and take the server up and downwithout any risk of messing up the main server.

This never happens in FreeBSD or Windows systems because people who wantto play and test will just set up their own server on their own computer(the one they use as a desktop, or whatever) and then they won't have toworry about messing anyone else up. But on the iSeries, companies usuallycan't afford a separate system for every developer. They'll have one testsystem that has to be shared by many developers. So, for testing, peopleset up their own instances instead of separate servers.

That's why your answer didn't make sense at first. DNS only controlswhich IP address you get when you look up a name. It doesn't switch todifferent instances. Sure, you can run lots of virtual hosts under oneinstance, but that doesn't provide the same level of insulation againstmessing up the server.

But, what didn't occur to me in that last message, is that you couldpotentially run different instances under different IP addresses insteadof different port numbers. That would work.