1: OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available...

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 02/07/01 07:47 AM

My company, ZillNet, is now offering OpenACS - based hosting,
with a focus on mod_aolserver.

I have found mod_aolserver to be quite stable, and though
AOLserver is a lot faster, it is more of a pain to keep up and
running. I'd rather have a slightly slower server with better
uptime than a fast server with less uptime.

I've taken a different route than the "shared server" approach -
each customer gets their own, separate machine to work on,
ensuring that whatever one does won't affect the others. This
also allows for tuning and load testing. Backups are handled via
rsync or scp to a separate machine connected to a RAID array.

The full details and contact information are at http://www.zill.net/ .

2: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/07/01 08:17 AM

So, details please for those of us who have no problems keeping our servers up...

What is causing your AOLserver instances to fall over?

This is not a rhetorical question, the AOLserver community is moving towards taking active steps to be in a position to investigate and fix any such problems, be they real or documentation shortfalls.

3: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 02/07/01 03:43 PM

Hi Don,

I should point out (as mentioned at
http://www.zill.net/mod_aolserver.html ) that the behavior I am
seeing comes from running under OpenBSD. The 3.0 binary that
I built from the OpenBSD "port package" will exit or zombie,
leaving no clues in any logfiles.

Quite frankly, the decision process to focus on mod_aolserver
went like this:

Choose OS: OpenBSD wins over Linux because of security
(flames to /dev/null) and documentation (man pages actually get
re-written if the program changes).

Given OpenBSD, what is the best way to get OpenACS up and
running on it? Answer: mod_aolserver. We compensate for any
performance difference by giving each customer their own box.

As I mention at the above URL, those who want to run their own
setup, whether it be Solaris/Linux/whatever, can easily do so by
shipping their own hardware for us to install.

4: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/07/01 08:28 PM

I have nothing against OpenBSD, so you needn't send me to /dev/null yet! I've been running Linux largely because that's where all the smoke and fire is. If I really believed that was important I supposed I'd run Apache, PHP and MySQL to, though, huh?

AOLserver has to be made stable on OpenBSD. This is disgraceful.

More news on the AOLserver community should be available today or towmorrow.

5: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Cavendish McKay on 02/07/01 08:47 PM

I had some troubles getting AOLserver/OpenACS to work on OpenBSD, as well. At first, certain errors from the database would cause segmentation faults; this was cured by using the postgres driver from OpenACS instead of the one from AOLserver. After that, I had lots of problems with zombie processes and "document contains no data" errors;
I removed the watchdog module, and I haven't had troubles since.

I'm really just a hobbyist as far as OpenACS and AOLserver are concerned, so I wasn't too interested in taking the time to figure out what exactly the problem is. I don't know tcl all that well, and so I imagine sifting through watchdog for the source of the problem would take a long time.

Just my $.02

6: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by mark dalrymple on 02/08/01 03:18 PM

I know in the aolserver 2.3.3/Linux days, the server was very sensitive to versions of glibc. It'd work fine on one distro but then fall over horribly on another. Since the 3.X source is out, it should be easier to fix things like libc dependencies (or work around problems in the system libraries. Fer instance when I tried porting AOLserver 2.X to free BSD 2.something, I ran into a some threading problems in the kernel and in the C libs)

7: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Bob Fuller on 02/09/01 06:54 PM

Hmmm... I tried checking out www.zill.net, and I got the following:

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused

Apache/1.3.12 Server at www.zill.net Port 80

This is kind of ironic, in light of the pitch for Apache, mod_aolserver, etc. ...

The "proxy server" message, by the way, is not on the end I was connecting from, since that end is a direct connection to the internet.

8: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 02/09/01 11:12 PM

Bob writes:

This is kind of ironic, in light of the pitch for Apache, mod_aolserver, etc. ...
====

Actually, the part that was down WAS the AOLserver process.

I have Apache sitting in front of AS in order to do vhosting. It was fixed by restarting the process, with about one hour downtime - would have been less, but I was working at a customer site (elsewhere) and they come first 😊 . The less-than-stellar admin didn't know how to open up the firewall to allow SSH connections .

The Apache process stays up and continues serving other domains regardless of what happens to www.zill.net .

9: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/09/01 11:27 PM

Mark - in private e-mail to me Patrick guessed that threading problems might be the problem, based on something he stumbled across somewhere.

10: Response to OpenACS / mod_aolserver hosting now available... (response to 1)

Posted by finn knudsen on 03/26/01 10:35 PM

Hi Patrick

I have looked at your site. Have you gotten mod_aolserver to work along with perl scripts ( and mod_perl ). I'am currently trying to
port my hobby site from perl to OpenACS and it would be great if I
could tie the to together in the beginning.

Finn

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