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international cluster

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2018.10.27

For kicks, I've turned my website into a cluster running out of New Jersey and Amsterdam across two hosting companies. This wasn't strictly speaking necessary, but I wanted to explore a dirt cheap availability setup. I'll have no worries about a single hosting company failing, or a power grid failure. Or even geologic or political upheaval.

(Um, not that I'm expecting any?)

I started up a second virtual machine, this time on Digital Ocean (my original provider was/is Linode). I copied over all of the images and HTML files, the PHP and nginx and Apache config files, and then got a slave database instance running off of my master on the old server. The latter I threaded through iptables, the firewall native to the operating system. Next I'll configure nginx as a cluster and change the DNS records and it'll all be live. And all of my readers in Eurasia will experience a big jump in website responsiveness. Right.

Three good things that happened today:

  1. Tinkering.
  2. With something that'll teach me something about what I do for a living.
  3. Successfully!

rand()m quote

The way you write science fiction is: you sit down at your writing machine and you open your mind to the first thought that comes through. My first thought was always a cigarette.

—-Frederik Pohl