IIS-Tomcat redirector proposal

Notes

• The IIS web servers contain very little content (just documentation "workbook"), and no web applications. All real web applications live on the tomcat servers.
• Purpose of redirector is just to protect against scheduled or unscheduled outages of the IIS servers. It would be good if it load balanced between the IIS servers just to verify that they are both working and synchronized.
• All of the tomcat servers are configured identically, except for the web applications they run. It is simple to move web applications manually from one server to another. Initially this will be enough to protect us against outages of the tomcat servers. (Eventually load-balancing/failover would be nice here too, but a lower priority and more complicated).
• We need to support SSL connections to glast-ground.

Questions

• Is the redirector necessary? Could we just use multiple IP addresses for glast-ground (I don't know of modern web browsers that support this).
• If the redrector is not available immediately should we plan to register (at least one) IIS server as a web server and move it to the range of IP addresses for port 80 web servers.
• Any recommended software for synchronizing files between windows boxes (we have used SecondCopy resonably sucessfully in the past).

Meeting with SCCS (23 January 2006)

Action items

• Tony will make improved diagram showing other dependencies (oracle, login services etc) to allow for future planning, in particular for thinking about how to deal with outages.
• Tony will contact web registration committee to register new IIS servers.
• We will try to use the Cisco router recommended by Gary Buhrmaster as a solution for the redirector, keeping in mind that it is only able to handle modest loads.
  • Gary will let us know what IP addresses to use for the redirector, and for the two IIS servers (they cannot be on the 134.79.18 subnet for technical reasons).
  • Rodney will arrange to have the IIS servers moved to new IP addresses
  • Tony will request an alias (zglast-ground) for testing the redirector
• SCCS recommends we try the File Replication Service built into windows for replicating files between the IIS servers. This is limited to copying about 100MBytes, but the files we need to copy are currently well below this limit.