Redundant Server Management

Redundant Server Management

You can distribute WebBoard across several servers. On large sites, this can increase performance. For example, a router handles incoming requests, sending each one to the server that can handle it faster. Redundancy also serves as a safety feature—if one of your systems goes down, the others can keep your boards up and running.

If you choose to take advantage of redundancy, during setup you designate one WebBoard installation as primary, the others as secondary. The primary installation is the only one responsible for:

Sending email notifications
Sending mailing list digests once a day
Archiving messages once a day
Checking the IN folder for new mailing list messages
Purging unverified users once a day
Reindexing search indexes
Deleting pages older than 30 minutes
Running the Chat server

Setting the primary server

When you installed WebBoard you designated one installation as primary. If you later decide to designate a different installation as primary, follow these steps:

On the computer with the primary server, close WebBoard if it is running.
Open WebBoard Properties and display the General tab.
In the redundancy options, check Secondary.
Enter the IP address of the computer that will run the primary installation.
Click Apply to save changes.
Go to the computer where you want the new primary server, following steps 1 and 2, and check the Primary checkbox on the General tab of WebBoard Properties.
Close WebBoard Properties.

Known Issues

Common File Settings

Multiple WebBoard installations must share the confs directory, which contains each board’s conference messages, the Images directory, which contains the images used on the HTML pages, the Upload directory, which contains file attachments, and the database, which contains all the WebBoard configuration settings and user information. Because they are shared, one or more computers will access these directories and the database over a network. This has an impact on the run mode of that machine. To run as an NT service, WebBoard must run under a user account, not as Local System, because the Local System account has no rights across a network and won’t be able to access the remote directories. The user account must also have sufficient privileges to access the database and the directories.

The settings for the directories can be changed at the following locations:

Confs Directory - Admin Menu: Misc. Server Settings, Messages folder
Images Path - Admin Menu | Change Appearance: Images
Upload Directory - Admin Menu: Misc. Server Settings, Attachments folder

Chat

The Chat server runs only on the primary installation. If chat is enabled, users who request chat from a secondary installation are sent to the primary computer. All secondary installations need the IP address of the primary installation’s computer in order to use Chat. You provided this information during installation. To change the IP address or review it to make sure it is correct, look on WebBoard Properties on the secondary installations’ computers.

Schemes and customized HTML pages

Each installation uses the HTML pages in its local HTML directory. This means that if you edit an HTML page on one installation, the changes are not automatically reflected on the others. For example, if you change the welcome message on your primary installation, the secondary installations will still use the default welcome. If you edit the HTML pages directly, copy the changed HTML pages to the other installations. Or you might want to set up an automatic directory replication device that ensures that changed HTML files are copied from your primary installation to the secondary ones. For example, Windows NT server provides a directory replication service available from the Server control panel. This service allows you to duplicate a master set of directories from a server (called an export server) to specified servers or workstations (called import computers) in the same or other domains. Replication simplifies the task of maintaining identical sets of directories and files on multiple computers, because only a single master copy of the data must be maintained. Once replication is set up, replication occurs each time a change is made to one of the files in a directory set for export. For details, see your Windows NT help.