[ZWeb] DISCUSS: Monitoring Zope.org

Bill Anderson bill@libc.org
Mon, 04 Sep 2000 13:30:12 -0600


Simon Coles wrote:


[good ideas snipped for brevity]

> For a temporary solution, how about taking a (say) weekly copy of
> Zope.org's contents and putting it on a separate server, read only.
> Tell a few people about it, and then when Zope.org is down, those
> people in the know can point the community at the temporary site.
> Maybe password it and change the password regularly to prevent people
> using that rather than the main site.
> 
> Yeah, this is a hack and it sucks. I'm sure a lot of the normal
> functionality of Zope.org won't work. But it would be quick to do, is
> better than nothing, and would help us continue working.

Even better, may be to use a failover setup. If the primary server fails, yesterday's RO copy (as an example) can take
over.

A decent Linux server running lvs with failover could accomplish this task fairly easy. It could also notify both the
webmaster, and this list when it takes over. Of course, at that point, it would be nice if zope could detect that it is
running in read-only mode, and indicate so in the navigation menu on the left. Something along the lines of "Failover
Activated, Read-only mode engaged".

Personally, with the use of ZEO, I would prefer multiple machines, or at least the ZSS on a seperate server. That way,
we could have read-only (if nothing else) zeo clients elsewhere to run in read-only as a backup for when zope goes down,
and it isn't a database error.

I am sure there are those in the community that would be up for serving a zeo client read-only as a backup 'mirror'.

Just some thoughts .... they may be incoherent, I;ve been working on the same thing here all night. %^}=

--
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are easy to annoy,
and have the root password.