Web Farm Support - Page 2

8/10/2011 7:01:44 AM

Joe Audette

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Re: Web Farm Support

Hi Mats,

That's good stuff! I've been surprised how many people are already running mojoPortal in various web farm configurations. That is why I decided its time to work on officially supporting web farms, and that is what I'm focused on right now. I'll be working on documentation also for web farm configurations and would be glad to have help if any community members would like to write tutorials about how they have configured things.

Best,

Joe

9/19/2011 8:53:05 AM

John S

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Re: Web Farm Support

Hi All,

I've done the same thing here (http://www.metrotransit.org) as Mats described, almost. We have the site on two load balanced servers with the MSSQL database on a two node cluster. File Replication Service is the best way to go but wasn't available to me when I set this up, so I used SyncToy to replicate files between the servers, run by a scheduled task once a minute, and it's been working great. Rather than replicating the entire Data folder, I have just a couple of sub folders replicating. The only drawback I've found in hosting on two servers is that each server keeps its own log file, so you just can't go to the logging in the admin and see entries for all servers at the same time. Not really a big deal if you can log into each server to review logs when it's really necessary. (hosts file entries make sure servers resolve to themselves.) I'll be setting up FRS as soon the domain controller on our DMZ gets upgraded. The replication is almost instant, but in the meantime SyncToy has worked like a charm.

John

9/19/2011 9:00:35 AM

Joe Audette

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Re: Web Farm Support

Hi John,

fyi, the next release of mojoPortal will have support for logging to the database so that both nodes can log to the same place. I'm already using logging to the database on this site.

Best,

Joe

9/21/2011 5:30:33 PM

Lillnor

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/Mats Lillnor

Re: Web Farm Support

We had the same issue with the log-files. We solved it by creating a folder structure for logs with two sub folders, one for each node and configure the sites on the different nodes to log to the specific sub-directory.

Joe. I was wondering about the log to db-option in next release of mojoPortal you mentioned.

How can that be made since logging is part of IIS outside of the application. Can that really be managed inside the application?

How do we access the log-data to use an external log-analyzer? Guess that there will be some configurable statistics pages within the admin sections of mojoPortal?

Will it be possible to log both to file and to the DB?

/Mats

9/22/2011 8:03:39 AM

Joe Audette

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Re: Web Farm Support

Hi Mats,

I guess you and maybe also John are talking about the IIS logs. I have no solution for that, it is outside the scope of mojoPortal. When I said I have implemented database logging I was talking of the mojoPortal log which only logs errors and other information logged from code. We use log4net for such logging and historically the logging has to been to a file at /Data/currentlog.config and is viewable from Administration > System Log

All I have done is implement a custom logging appender for log4net that logs to the database so that we can have one central error log for all nodes.

From a quick research it doesn't sound like there is a way to log multiple web site nodes to the same IIS log. The suggestions seem to be that one could use logparser to process the separate log files into a database. In fact they say it is better for each node to log separately so that if there is a problem on a specific node it can be identified. Even if there were a way to do it, it would have to be something outside of mojoPortal.

Just on a side note, one interesting tool I've seen lately is this free Log Parser Lizard that provides a nice GUI on top of the Microsoft log parser and allows querying against the IIS log files. Scott Hanselman has a nice blog post about it.

Best,

Joe

12/14/2011 10:15:40 AM

John S

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Re: Web Farm Support

This is kind of a late response, but I was also referring to the mojoPortal log files. The database logging solution has been working great for me. This solves the only unresolved issue I had with the site on two web servers. As for the IIS logs, I use AWStats and merge logs from two different proxy servers for traffic reports.

John