Re: Mirroring

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Youcef Rabah Rahal <rahal at arabeyes dot org> wrote:
> The "problem" with mirroring our website is the database mirroring.
> We have a MySQL database which is located on the sina server and which
> is not accessible from the outside. I'm not really familiar with security
> hazards that are related to making the DB accessible from the outside 

Well, a couple of other approaches could be,

 1. We copy the databases remotely as well but disable all modification
    access to them with an error message that says "This is a mirror, to
    do what you want go to the main site - www.arabeyes.org".  This would
    mean that the central database (the one on arabeyes.org) would have
    to be copied (or broadcast) remotely to all the mirrors periodically.

 2. Provide a secure means to access the database so that mirrors will
    be able to modify content as well (not sure if this is easily done,
    but it is rather a logical extension to what one can do nowadays).

> Anyway, mirroring means having as many databases as servers. This means we 
> will have to synchronize all of them (daily ?). I'm not sure there will be 
> much data to be synchronized, but still, it means we have to write scripts, 
> test them etc and I'm not sure it's really worth it: lots of work, little 
> outcome.

I would be against any synchronization at all - if we opt for that approach
then I think we failed to do the job correctly (ie. there's got to be a
better way).

> All in all, I think it is needed but premature.

I would tend to agree, but would like to get the ball (and proper people)
rolling in thinking about this and in looking and researching this topic.
We continue to get new (not to mention our current sleepy audience) people
that denote PHP/mysql expertise and so this would be a rather nice self-
contained area to go look into and come back with recommendations.

Eid Mubarak (still) to all :-)

 - Nadim


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