Current proceedings
I am currently writing a handbook for a WISE 1.3 installation at an operational site. That is an
- Installation (+ Modification),
- Administration and
- user document
in one or three seperate papers.
While the documentation that comes with WISE is ok for a plain vanilla setup, the above have to take the local environment into account.So much work to do.
On parllel Track we set up a multiserver environment to check if the clustering works as advertised.So far we found out, that again, it is not a good idea to use foldernames with spaces to hold wise\data.
Everything installs fine, but the WISE SERVERS will not connect to the Database Server because he cannot locate the datapath given. ?!
After having fixed that, we turned towards the loadbalancer wich seemed to be the most interesting role in the whole setup.On our WISE 1.2 cluster that is operational in a headquarter, we had to take POUND as a LB because we couldn’t get Apache 2.2.x to admire sticky sessions.
As we knew about the problem we were curious how ACT had solved that with the new version.Obviously they didn’t. 🙁
Out of the box, load balancing works pingpong with 2 WISE Servers as long as you don’t have to logon to maintain the Information. You log on and the form fields are posted to the o t h e r server naturally. This one might log you on and the next REQUEST / RESPONSE goes to / comes from the o t h e r Server…… guess what.
Functionally, once a logon is established, the user(session) has to stick to the one server that he loged onto, in order to keep this communication from going tumbleweed. We now have the problem to make an Apache balance the load between 2 + n Apache servers, which is not as simple as it seems.If you have any ideas on that, we are allways open to suggestions.I’ll keep you posted.
Mickey