Topic: Giving e-smith 2 Internet IP's?

[Bill Talcott]

Our small company had been using a Rebel.com NetWinder for a little over a year. Basically it's an e-smith server. It uses its own software and runs on a little StrongARM system-in-a-box about the size of a cable modem. The hard drive in it died, and we found out that Rebel.com was going out of business. We didn't have time to monkey around trying to fix the old one or waiting for a new one to possibly get shipped from the company buying them out, so we went to an e-smith at my suggestion.

The NetWinder was named mail, and its primary website (http://mail.chrouch.com) was the configuration stuff, similar to "http://myesmith.com/e-smith-manager/". We had the main website set up as a user (www) of the system, and set up as a virtual host of sorts. http://www.chrouch.com had its own IP, and was pointed at "http://mail.chrouch.com/~www/" basically. The NetWinder had 2 IPs, one for mail.chrouch.com and one for www.chrouch.com, though both were on the same machine

Now, with the e-smith only getting the one IP (x.x.x.56), www.chrouch.com is still pointed to x.x.x.57, which doesn't exist. I believe the easiest way to fix this is to give the e-smith both x.x.x.56 and x.x.x.57. Or I can update the DNS entries for www.chrouch.com to point at x.x.x.56 also. Since the primary site of the e-smith is the real website (as opposed to the HTML-based configuration), I don't need to do the virtual host stuff, I just need www.chrouch.com to point to the e-smith, either by changing the IP that www.chrouch.com points to or by also giving the e-smith the IP that www.chrouch.com points to. I'm no expert on this stuff, and we had another company set up the NetWinder originally, so I'm not sure exactly what I need to do.

Please give suggestions on what I should do, and how to go about doing it. We have three static IPs. We don't gain anything by not using them, if that's an issue.

Thanks,
Bill

[Rangi Biddle]

Here is a suggestion:

Map out where you want your traffic to go.

Eg.
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.56 - Web Server
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.57 - Mail Server
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.58 - FTP, SSH, Any other service you require.

If you know that your Web Server is receiving alot of traffic then it may be an idea to implement a secondary Web Server to utilize the extra IP address.

Eg.
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.56 - Web Server 1
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.57 - Web Server 2
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.58 - Mail Server

Using this type of layout is a good idea if you expect your traffic to be quite high as well as it will allow the server to not get so overloaded that it eventually crashes.
Also since you are using the E-Smith as a solution why not take full advantage of the distribution and use RAID to mirror your webservers between each other.  This will allow you to always be up and running and if at some point a server goes down the secondary web server should kick in and your primary web server can rebuild from the RAID array.

Also having the Mail Server as a standalone service allows your E-Smith servers to focus on delivering your website to your customers instead of being lagged down with processing mail meaning that your website can handle more customers.

Now as to what to do with your DNS entries.  Contact whoever is hosting your DNS records and ask them unless you are doing it yourself using the suggestion I have provided to change your MX profile to point to your mailserver and to add a secondary IP to your domain name.

This sort of setup however does require that you use 3 individual machines.  Since I am not sure on your financial status I can however suggest other options but for best overall performance I recommend opting for the 3 machine setup.

If you need more information email me at rangi@cybershed.net