Well, I thought I'd try out Tux - Red Hat's Content Accelerator. It's a kernel module that handles HTTP requests. If it doesn't want to handle the given request, it palms it off to the normal httpd (typically Apache).
My setup's perhaps a bit odd. Perhaps not. Apache with mod_perl handles about 5 virtual hosts, each with its own Mason handler (due to the need for different component roots).
Component root wise, the server looks a bit like:
/www/sites/_host_/html/
/www/sites/_host_/mason/
/www/sites/mason/
So, first pages are seen and I can hide any non-pages away into either the site specific component area or into the global root for components shared between sites.
Perhaps this is a common way to set it up. No idea.
Anyway - with that all running on normal ports (since I didn't want to take the server offline merely to play with Tux; and the new backup hasn't arrived yet), I enable Tux to listen on a port (the port I specifically have unfirewalled so that I can play with alternate server stuff) and to put any unknown requests through to Apache.
Typically, people set mod_perl up with a dual Apache system: light weight proxy instance, and the heavy weight mod_perl one. Makes some things more efficient. My thought is that Tux should be able to do broadly the same thing and with less hassle.
And it does. But not for me. For some reason, when the request is passed to Apache, the fact that the request is for a virtual host appears to be forgotten and is passed to the default virtual host handler. Hmm. Maybe it's not really happening that way and I just need to set up virtual host handlers for some strange port number. I tried setting up handlers on both 80 and the test port (on the grounds that Tux would get the first go anyway). Nada.
So I've gone away for a bit to think.
While going away, I decided to rejig some pages I'd been meaning to rejig for slightly over half a year. Removed a lot of crufty HTML from them (they were initially based on the university's new standard for web page look) and refactored some of the gadgets and groupings into separate components.
So rather than an unsightlyish blue and yellow scheme (university colours and almost the Hall's colours), it's now mostly white and grey and blue. Very clean looking. And I moved the quick links from the left to the right. That'll be the bit that throws everyone =) Other than that, everything else is the same, it just looks different.
Took the opportunity to remove some of the custom time handling code and replaced it with
Time::Piece usage. That's a sweet module.
Hmm. Back to Tux.
