Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Virtual Hosting with ACS/AOLServer

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Posted by C. R. Oldham on
With AOLserver 4, yes, you can virtual host more in an Apache style.  I don't think, however, that anyone has actually run multiple OpenACS instances in this configuration, or even a single OpenACS instance with additional "bare" AOLserver instances.  OpenACS loads a *ton* of Tcl into the server. If you have to restart the server (to load new packages for example) in the vhost scenario you will have to down *all* your servers.

However, this is still true with Apache--you can't restart a single virtual host.

Currently (OCT members want to chime in here?) I think the community party line is that each OpenACS instance should run on its own AOLserver.  That's not to say you couldn't try it out.  ScottG in particular did a lot of work to make sure that nsopenssl would work with virtual hosts (barring the issue that the ssl negotiation occurs before the Host: header is transmitted so it still isn't possible to host multiple https servers on the same IP).

The AOLserver core team may be working on ways to restart individual virtual hosts.  It is technically possible, though it might not be feasible.

--cro

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Posted by Tom Ayles on

I think the most recent discussion of this was in this thread.

>OpenACS loads a *ton* of Tcl into the server.

I'm guessing that seem as no-one has knowingly pulled it off, this might be a tough one to answer, but: Does anyone know how the resource consumption of running multiple OpenACS instances in a 'single' AOLServer would compare to running them in seperate AOLServer instances? Or in terms of security? I'm debating whether its worth spending the time to try and get the former configuration working...

TIA,
Tom