From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-01-21T01:26:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

James Britt wrote:
> Ben Giddings wrote:
>> I don't think the technical issues should be too hard.  Apache, at 
>> least, is happy to serve docs from multiple virtual hosts, and 
>> something can be known as say rubyforge.org, www.rubyforge.org and 
>> rubyforge.ruby-lang.org pretty easily.
> 
> 
> Serving from the same machine is one thing; servicing requests when the 
> sites are on physically distinct machines, under separate administrative 
> control, is another.  I don't know enough about Apache to say for sure; 
> it may be enough to engineer redirects to other sites so that a request 
> for docs.ruby.org (or whatever) lands you on www.ruby-doc.org.

Right, but it would all be the same machine.

Say the sites are currently set up as follows:
www.ruby-lang.org has the IP address 192.168.0.1
*.rubyforge.org   has the IP address 192.168.0.2
*.ruby-doc.org    has the IP address 192.168.0.3
...

All you'd have to do is adjust the DNS entries for ruby-lang.org so 
that, for instance, rubyforge.ruby-lang.org pointed to 192.168.0.2.

The web server on the 192.168.0.2 machine would then have have to 
respond to requests for either *.rubyforge.org or 
rubyforge.ruby-lang.org.  In apache, this is normally easy to set up, 
though occasionally some web-based apps require a server name to be set, 
to be used in self-referential URLs, so someone might come in on 
rubyforge.ruby-lang.org, but would end up with their browser displaying 
www.rubyforge.org.  But, I don't think that's a big deal.

All that's required is that the DNS system know that www.ruby-doc.org 
and ruby-doc.ruby-lang.org (or docs.ruby-lang.org, or all of the above) 
all point to the same IP address, and then that the server listening on 
that IP know what to do with the requests.

Ben