My "sysadmin hat" is a grocery bag over my head

I am not a sysadmin. I've worked in a few *NIX environments, but knowing vi and some shell commands somehow didn't prepare me for being root of my FreeBSD/Zope account with iMeme . I hope to use this page to take notes for myself and others as I go down the long road to FreeBSD/Squid/Apache/Zope enlightenment. Whee.

My main concern lately has been that my zope crashes occasionally, and the only way I find this out is by checking one of my sites and having a heart attack that it does not appear. This does not seem like an efficient solution. I was thinking about squid and reverse proxies and so on, when a thread on the Zope list appeared discussing this very thing. Sean Upton had some of the more interesting things to say; unfortunately, I didn't follow some of the messages very well! Also see the main digest for that month and search on the page for "static fail-over".

Reading Material

• HTTP Cacheing and Zope
• Preconditions (they are important for setting the ICP headers on an image; is this still true?)
• RFC2186 (the RFC for the Internet Cache Prtocol, ver. 2)
• The Squid cache and direct links to the FAQ and the configuration manual ; by the way, in the thread I pointed out above, Sean Upton suggested looking at negative_ttl
• Squid performance tips
• the squirm redirector plug-in (a redirector is needed if you are going to use a virtual hosting tool but there are several available and you can also roll your own)
• Squid reverse proxy support (this actually seems closest to what I really want--too bad it's in beta and does not seem to be in active development!)
• RFC2068 (this is the HTTP 1.1 RFC) ...or wait... I'm confused... what about RFC2616 then?
• The StandardCacheManagers are part of the usual distribution now, I think, but it's worth noting that we are mostly talking about stuff that the http accelerated cache manager would be concerned with (and there are some nice help pages in the Zope help system about this product, I believe).
• Ah-ha! Marc Lindahl put up some squid and zope nuts and bolts ! Hallelujah!

Well, that's just a bit of reading, eh? I'll get to work on it...

Another part of this, of course, is not just a cache for when things break, so the basic anonymous user might not have interrupted service, but also a way to restart Zope when it dies. I have seen some daemon-like suggestions, which again go off into an area about which I know next to nothing; folks have talked about it on the lists I remember but I didn't take notes for that one. I'll have to see what I can dig up.

For now, this may have to take a back seat to some other projects. We'll see. Another thing that seems interesting is Apache 2.0 reverse proxy support in some of the modules--mod_proxy, or ProxyRewrite (a Perl module?), for instance.