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[Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers
How hard would it be (besides resource intensive) to make bricolage work
for virtual hosts?

From what I see you could pass the database handler dynamically as in
the Mason handler.pl examples. Other than making the burn directory
locations also dynamic, what else is involved? Is this a dumb idea?
Couldn't I just pass these bricolage.conf variables directly from the
httpd.conf?

Will there really be much more system usage than a single site? I am
thinking that is wouldn't be other than having a lot more db usage.

I have just started looking it over and I think bricolage is great!
This is one of the best CMS's I have ever seen.

Thank you for any insight,
Chris Hamilton


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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Chris Hamilton wrote:

> How hard would it be (besides resource intensive) to make bricolage work
> for virtual hosts?

As in multiple Bricolax running in one Apache instance? That would be
very hard. There's a lot of global state and global configuration in
Bricolage - database handles are just the tip of the iceberg.

Where I work we're planning to setup multiple Bricolage instances on a
single server using a different strategy. Each Bricolage server will have
it's own private IP address (10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, etc). Then I'll setup a
reverse proxy server (Apache or Squid) on the machine's real IP with
virtual hosts for each Bricolage instance. This should yield the same
results as running each Bricolage within a separate virtual host.

> Will there really be much more system usage than a single site? I am
> thinking that is wouldn't be other than having a lot more db usage.

That's a little hard to answer. There's not all that much data available
on Bricolage performance and it's not an easy application to load test.
We've been running our test systems on PIII-600s with 1GB of ram and the
performance has been excelent with a small number of concurent users. I
tried to install it on my P200 with 64MB of ram and each pages took
anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to load!

-sam





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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
Sam Tregar wrote:

>On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Chris Hamilton wrote:
>
>>How hard would it be (besides resource intensive) to make bricolage work
>>for virtual hosts?
>>
>
>As in multiple Bricolax running in one Apache instance? That would be
>very hard. There's a lot of global state and global configuration in
>Bricolage - database handles are just the tip of the iceberg.
>
>Where I work we're planning to setup multiple Bricolage instances on a
>single server using a different strategy. Each Bricolage server will have
>it's own private IP address (10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, etc). Then I'll setup a
>reverse proxy server (Apache or Squid) on the machine's real IP with
>virtual hosts for each Bricolage instance. This should yield the same
>results as running each Bricolage within a separate virtual host.
>
>>Will there really be much more system usage than a single site? I am
>>thinking that is wouldn't be other than having a lot more db usage.
>>
>
>That's a little hard to answer. There's not all that much data available
>on Bricolage performance and it's not an easy application to load test.
>We've been running our test systems on PIII-600s with 1GB of ram and the
>performance has been excelent with a small number of concurent users. I
>tried to install it on my P200 with 64MB of ram and each pages took
>anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to load!
>
>-sam
>
Hmm, I am not sure this would work well for my situation.

Each DB for bricolage takes 10MB just to set up, so I am thinking it
might not
be good to try it the way I was thinking as well.

I have been playing with the permissions for admin. Would there be a way to
give virtual hosters complete administration over a category or
something. Let
them add users, etc. as if they were the full admin, but have their
changes and all
things they do only influence their directory? This way would also be
good for the real
admin as then they could have complete access to help the virtual admin
if required.

I don't think it is possible now to do something like that is it?
Could it be added in, or does
it conflict with the current system (ie. major table restructuring).

Thank you,
Chris Hamilton



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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Chris Hamilton wrote:

> Hmm, I am not sure this would work well for my situation.
>
> Each DB for bricolage takes 10MB just to set up, so I am thinking it
> might not be good to try it the way I was thinking as well.

I don't think I understand what you're driving at here. I thought you
were asking if it was possible to setup separate Bricolage instances
inside a single Apache server using virtual hosts. In such a setup each
Bricolage instance would still need its own database. I don't think
separate Bricolage instances are ever going to be able to share a databse,
but maybe that's not what you meant?

> I have been playing with the permissions for admin. Would there be a
> way to give virtual hosters complete administration over a category or
> something. Let them add users, etc. as if they were the full admin, but
> have their changes and all things they do only influence their
> directory? This way would also be good for the real admin as then they
> could have complete access to help the virtual admin if required.

Category level permissions are definitely something I think we should add
to the system. We're already planning to allow permissions to control
visbility - i.e. if you can't access something then you don't see it at
all. Combining the two you might end up with a system where multiple
disparate groups of users could cohabitate in one Bricolage instance
without tripping over each other.

However, nothing we're currently planning has anything to do with virtual
hosts... Could you explain what you're proposing in more detail? I get
the sense I'm missing the point.

-sam


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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
Sam Tregar wrote:

>On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Chris Hamilton wrote:
>
>>Hmm, I am not sure this would work well for my situation.
>>
>>Each DB for bricolage takes 10MB just to set up, so I am thinking it
>>might not be good to try it the way I was thinking as well.
>>
>
>I don't think I understand what you're driving at here. I thought you
>were asking if it was possible to setup separate Bricolage instances
>inside a single Apache server using virtual hosts. In such a setup each
>Bricolage instance would still need its own database. I don't think
>separate Bricolage instances are ever going to be able to share a databse,
>but maybe that's not what you meant?
>

What I meant was that I don't want to allocate 10MB for each instance. I
want the
system as light as possible. See below...

>
>>I have been playing with the permissions for admin. Would there be a
>>way to give virtual hosters complete administration over a category or
>>something. Let them add users, etc. as if they were the full admin, but
>>have their changes and all things they do only influence their
>>directory? This way would also be good for the real admin as then they
>>could have complete access to help the virtual admin if required.
>>
>
>Category level permissions are definitely something I think we should add
>to the system. We're already planning to allow permissions to control
>visbility - i.e. if you can't access something then you don't see it at
>all. Combining the two you might end up with a system where multiple
>disparate groups of users could cohabitate in one Bricolage instance
>without tripping over each other.
>
>However, nothing we're currently planning has anything to do with virtual
>hosts... Could you explain what you're proposing in more detail? I get
>the sense I'm missing the point.
>
>-sam
>
Sure, sorry I am confusing you. I would like to add bricolage as a
hosting option on my
server. I would like to add it as a CMS system for client users (each
user being content independent
and secured from other users). I would make it so the resulting
production pages appear on the
users virtual host.

The development/preview can be done on a single host as long as the
users are unique. Right now I
am giving each user account a system account. Under a system like
bricolage there would
also be virtual users authorized by the system account while acting as
the virtual admin.
Clients under our hosting could then have whoever they like work on
their content, etc..

The virtual hosts could be something as simple as resulting directories
of the publishing root I think.
Then each system account just has their own 'category' under the main
system.

So they would be on:
Bricolage server:
bri.here.com.sg

Preview directory:
bri.here.com.sg/example.com/ -> /var/www/preview/example.com

Production:
www.example.com -> /var/www/production/example.com

Virtual admin: name or example.com
Virtual users: name@example.com

This would keep everything in one DB and not overload the system hopefully.

I'll poke around and see if I have a clue as to how to go about this.
Any major changes between
development and stable that would touch this area?

I am just looking to integrate it into small hosting biz as cheaply and
secure as possible. I want it to
be cheap for clients to use as well.

Thanks,

-Chris


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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Chris Hamilton wrote:

> Sure, sorry I am confusing you. I would like to add bricolage as a
> hosting option on my server. I would like to add it as a CMS system for
> client users (each user being content independent and secured from other
> users). I would make it so the resulting production pages appear on the
> users virtual host.

Ok, I think I see where you're going. I serriously doubt that you can do
this without creating a separate Bricolage install for each client. Even
if we add category-level permissions and visibility control there are
still areas where the setup is basically global - element definition
occurs to me immediately.

> I'll poke around and see if I have a clue as to how to go about this.
> Any major changes between development and stable that would touch this
> area?

I don't think so. I've got some ideas about the category and elements
definition systems that I'll be posting as RFCs sometime in the next week
or two. I think there might be some cross-over between your needs and
mine.

Good luck,
-sam



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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
On Sat, 2002-02-16 at 13:42, Sam Tregar wrote:

> Ok, I think I see where you're going. I serriously doubt that you can do
> this without creating a separate Bricolage install for each client. Even
> if we add category-level permissions and visibility control there are
> still areas where the setup is basically global - element definition
> occurs to me immediately.

<snip />

Actually, FWIW, there are already Category and Element permissions. If I
understand you correctly, you can create user groups for each of your
clients, and then create a category and an element group for the
categories and elements that a given client is allowed to edit, and then
give the Client's user group EDIT permission to those category and
Element groups.

This is how the World Health Organization is going to use a single
instance of Bricolage to create what appear to be separate workflows,
stories, etc., for each department.

Play around with the permissions -- I think they just might give you
what you need.

Regards,

David

--
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david@kineticode.com ICQ: 15726394
Yahoo!: dew7e
Jabber: Theory@jabber.org
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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
Sam Tregar wrote:
>
> On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Chris Hamilton wrote:
>
> > Sure, sorry I am confusing you. I would like to add bricolage as a
> > hosting option on my server. I would like to add it as a CMS system for
> > client users (each user being content independent and secured from other
> > users). I would make it so the resulting production pages appear on the
> > users virtual host.

In a way your situation doesn't sound to terribly different
in some ways from ours at my work. We have an organization
of hundreds of entities, most of whome have their own sites
at the moment (published with frontpage or worse). We're
trying to convert over to Bricolage, one at a time of
course.

The plan for now is try to run everything out of a single
instance, at least until the demand picks up, and to figure
out some way to hide one entity's workflow from the others.

I don't even know yet if this is possible, but if not I'm
sure my boss will try to push it to the top of the to-do
list.

Mark

--
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=================================================================
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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
On 16 Feb 2002, David Wheeler wrote:

> Actually, FWIW, there are already Category and Element permissions. If I
> understand you correctly, you can create user groups for each of your
> clients, and then create a category and an element group for the
> categories and elements that a given client is allowed to edit, and then
> give the Client's user group EDIT permission to those category and
> Element groups.

Oh, interesting, I didn't realize that. I'll have to play with this and
see how it works.

I had a thought recently about the permissions system: our default set is
much too large. The result is that the permissions screens are needlessly
complicated by a huge number of pre-existing groups. We should support
complicated security systems but I don't think we should ship with such a
verbose default set. What would think about paring it down a bit?

-sam


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Re: [Bricolage-Devel] Virtual Servers [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 2002-02-18 at 15:21, Sam Tregar wrote:

<snip />

> I had a thought recently about the permissions system: our default set is
> much too large. The result is that the permissions screens are needlessly
> complicated by a huge number of pre-existing groups. We should support
> complicated security systems but I don't think we should ship with such a
> verbose default set. What would think about paring it down a bit?

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll add a To Do item.

D

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