You can set it if you want manually (you'll have to clear the cached one out of the config table in the DB), but you most certainly do not want to set it to the hostname for the machine. WWWRoot is the hostname that your installation is visible at, not the one it's hosted on.
Also, in the config.php file; then what do you point the "wwwroot" at please? I currently have it set to "eportfolio.us.edu". Should this actually be set to "mahapp1.us.edu". That is, the name of the localhost rather than the name seen by clients?
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When hits reach your load balancer, they'll come in for host 'eportfolio.us.edu'. Your load balancer will forward the request to one of your servers, keeping this intact. So a request will come into 'makapp1' with an HTTP header of Host: eportfolio.us.edu.
All you have to do after this is make your apache serve requests for this hostname, which you can do with a virtualhost and ServerName directive. A quick example:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName eportfolio.us.edu
DocumentRoot /path/to/mahara/code
# Other configuration directives you want - ErrorLog, CustomLog, Allow overrides from documentroot...
</VirtualHost>
This will be identical on all your webservers.
I encourage you to read the apache documentation for vhosts and perhaps try to find a tutorial if you need one
]]>Our mahara application layer servers have names like mahapp[1|n]. The outside, as seen by customers, would be eportfolio.us.edu for example. The question then is the Apache config file must surely ensure that entries put into the database look like "eportfolio.us.edu" even though the system is actually called makapp1. Is it possible to obtain extract sof relevant entries in a couple examples of httpd.conf so I can work out our changes please.
]]>If you're doing layer 4 load balancing, e.g. with ipvs, you don't need to worry about server affinity for requests. Sessions in dataroot handles this fine.
Mahara doesn't handle locking for dataroot - NFS can handle this by itself. Configuring NFS to perform can be a bit of a pain, but is possible.
Howvever, the primary concern at the moment is the configuration with multiple webservers. I believe we will have load balancers out in front of the application layer. I guess we are after any pointers on what not to do and any best practice or procedures for configuring multiple webservers. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Please note, yes we know about sharing a common dataroot between the webservers so as to retain session info etc. I also guess that Mahara must play some part in any locking required for sharing of data in this common area.
An item of interest was how the apache server configuration was done on each webserver. Rather, what were the differences please?
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But, if you have set up a Moodle cluster, the same principles apply. You should be able to roll out Mahara on the same servers as your Moodle without any fuss.
please describe what you mean with "multiple front ends", you have done with moodle.
Sounds very interesting.
Greeetings from the black forest
Heinz
We have implemented multiple front ends with the moodle.
Is anybody there who implemented same sort of thing with Mahara ? And uses one database ?
Regards... Andrew
]]>I wonder if anyone can provide an aswer to the following... if we run Mahara in a cluster and one of the servers crashed or had to be taken out, will it automatically relocate users the remaining working servers? Would the users then be required to re-authenticate against the server? Or will all this happen transparently?
Cheers Andrew
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