How do I set up the Boost module and rsync in order to make mirroring a breeze?

Question

I'm looking for a way to setup a server in order to make the static caches created by boost module easily mirrorable to several other servers.

Answer 1

here are some ideas...

If you want to prevent getting stabbed in the back by your hosting provider wouldn't be better to use a solution that doesn't rely on the hosting provider?

My choice would be to use a third party dns provider which supports Round Robin [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_robin_DNS ] -or your own server configured to support round robin- (which you can also use for auto-load-balancing).

Round robin should allow you to have several A addresses and, every time someone goes to your domain, it checks whether the servers are up or down, and redirects to the servers that are up.

For the static caches I think you could use rsync, but that's involving your hosting provider. Maybe a better way (but I think not resource-efficient) would be to have clones of your drupal installation in each server, then syncing the DBs using MySql Mirroring (and cron to create the boost static cache)... then you would not depend on any server because all of them would have the whole site and use Round Robin to redirect your domain to the working server.

Answer 2

You COULD use rsync to do this but it is brittle and liable to break. You would be better off by using either:

• a single shared network filesystem
• or my recommended solution, use a cluster distributed filesystem such as glusterFS. This is what is generally used on web server clusters for distributing web apps across nodes automagically.