Central Web Support: The Next Generation

By Shannon Eric Peevey, UNT Central Web Support

We are excited to present a new dynamic content web farm, which will become the default installation for all dynamic content web hosting for Central Web Support.  This farm will have increased stability and security over the existing dynamic content web server (web2), and is the recommended environment for all new web sites that use dynamic content hosted with Central Web Support.  The farm consists of:

- 4 x apache2 web servers

- 2 x clustered ColdFusion MX 7 Application servers

- 1 x MySQL 5.0 machine (soon to be a master/slave or clustered configuration)

The following is a list of important information that will help you to decide if/when you want to migrate your applications from web2 to the new framework.

Adobe ColdFusion MX 7

We are now clustering Adobe ColdFusion MX to create a highly-available support for ColdFusion applications.  There are currently two machines in the cluster, with a plan to move to four machines after the start of the fiscal new year 2006-2007.

Here is a link to the release notes documenting new features, migration information, and changes in the current release:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/coldfusion/mx7/releasenotes.html

The only major configuration change between ColdFusion MX on web2 and ColdFusion MX on the new dynamic web farm:

    - J2EE session variables are enabled.

PHP5

We are now happy to offer PHP5 on the new dynamic content web farm.  This will have a locked down php.ini, which will include:

; - safe_mode = On

;   For more information read:

;   http://www.php.net/features.safe-mode

;

; - safe_mode_protected_env_vars = LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH

;

; - open_basedir = /ourwebroot/

;

; - disable_functions =  dl, system, include, shell_exec, ;   exec, escapeshellarg, escapeshellcmd, passthru,

;   proc_close, proc_open, proc_get_status, proc_nice,

;   proc_open, proc_terminate, popen, pclose, chown,

;   disk_free_space, disk_total_space, diskfreespace,

;   fileinode, max_execution_time, set_time_limit,

;   highlight_file, show_source

;

; - expose_php = Off

;

; - error_log = syslog 

;

; - register_globals = Off  

;   Read for further information:

;   http://php.net/manual/en/security.registerglobals.php

;

; - display_errors = Off       

;

; - log_errors = On     

;

; - output_buffering = 4096  

;

; - register_argc_argv = Off  

;

; - magic_quotes_gpc = On     

;

; - variables_order = "GPCS"  

;

; - error_reporting = E_ALL     

;

; - allow_call_time_pass_reference = Off  

;

; - enable_dl = Off     

;

; - file_uploads = Off          

;

; - allow_url_fopen = Off      

MySQL 5.0

We are now offering MySQL 5.0 as a database backend for the web3 farm. 

Changes to MySQL 5.0 are documented here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/news-5-0-x.html
 

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/news-5-0-18.htm

We will continue to use phpMyAdmin to administer our MySQL databases.  The URL for phpMyAdmin is: http://my.host.name/phpmyadmin

Publishing Information

There are no publishing changes on the new web framework.  You will still publish to: http://my.host.name:8080/myweb

Web Stats

We are switching to another web stats program called Webalizer .  This program will generate daily stats, and will keep a history of web stats for up to one year.  You will be able to access your web stats at: http://my.host.name/stats

We are currently working on an easy way to view subweb stats, but do not have it in place yet.

In Conclusion

We are excited about our new infrastructure, and hope that you will join us in making UNT's web presence vital and exciting for the our students, faculty, and staff.  To get involved in beta testing our new services, please send an email to cws@unt.edu requesting more information.