[SAC] Virtual Hosts Policy

[Tyler Mitchell]

This all makes sense to me.  There is increasing need for web hosting  
with vhosts, it seems, as more projects move over to this new  
infrastructure.  I prefer the project-based names but could argue  
either way.

Tyler

On 22-Jan-07, at 12:53 PM, Howard Butler wrote:

> All,
>
> I propose that we make every attempt to use virtual hosts and  
> explicit DNS for services that we provide.  This document will  
> outline the proposal and why I think this is important for us in  
> the future.
>
> As Jason pointed out, some search engines penalize certain  
> layouts.  As evidenced by the "Subversion is 403 right now" thread,  
> monkeypatching with rewrites can have unintended consequences and  
> eventually get downright impossible to track through and maintain.   
> For an organization as multifaceted as we are, I do not think that  
> mere rewriting is a long term solution.
>
> Our experience on Collabnet showed us that a massive proliferation  
> of DNS-bound services can be a large burden.  Knowing where you are  
> and what you were dealing with was tiring and tedious.  On the  
> other hand, explicit separation of either projects or services will  
> provide us flexibility in the future.  I propose that we choose one  
> -- separate based on services or separate based on project -- for  
> things like Trac, Subversion, Buildbot, and Web hosting.  CN's  
> approach was ok except for the fact that it proliferated so many  
> "projects" that things got crazy.  Right now, we have all of our  
> eggs in this bucket, but in the future we may want to spread a few  
> around.
>
> So, we have things look like
> http://gdal.osgeo.org/trac http://gdal.osgeo.org/svn
>
> or
> http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal
>
> but not like
> http://svn.osgeo.org/svn/gdal http://trac.osgeo.org/trac/gdal
>
>
> Some virtues of this approach include:
> - Our ability to offload this service from the existing single  
> machine to someplace else when and if we need to without much  
> service disruption and minimal migration (URL relocation pain).
> - Guess-able and non-redundant URLs, once we establish a pattern  
> and stick to it.
> - Fat-fingering a setting in one virtual host doesn't hose everyone  
> else.  If we're to distribute the administration load, it is  
> important that changes be as localized as possible.
>
>
> Thoughts or comments?  Project based or service based (makes no  
> difference to me, as long as we choose one)?  When we come to  
> agreement on how to proceed, I'll write up a "policy doc" for the  
> wiki that we can follow when adding new services/projects.
>
> Howard
>
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