Running filePro on a web server

[Fairlight]

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 11:02:35AM -0700, Richard Hane thus spoke:
> 1. In a perfect world which would you use; your own servers or on a
> service?   2. Why (other then cost)?   3. This one is probably for fptech
> but if you are running multiple users from multiple customers how does
> the licensing and user count work?  4. I assume I will stay with fpWeb
> unless filePro has some thing new and hasn't told us yet.  Anyone heard
> anything?

1) Managed, hosted VPS at a multi-homed carrier facility.

2) It's the best compromise between in-house single points of failure
servers, and ridiculously expensive self-owned racks at a carrier facility.
You can manage your VPS (in many cases) as a discrete machine.  The only
"gotcha" is Virtuozzo Parallels, which runs a central kernel in the
node hypervisor, over which you have no control.  But the rest of the OS is
yours to do with as you please.  I'd personally look for VMWare hosting,
although it's going to be less common and more expensive.

3) filePro binaries are done by-the-seat, period.  It has no concept of
customers.  You build that framework into your application as Richard
suggested, but you're still bottlenecked at the seat level.  Fortunately,
with CGI, transactions are fairly quick in well-written applications.
There are also ways to extend the license in a CGI environment.

4) You really, really want to look at Fairlight OneGate
( http://www.fairlite.com/fc/products/onegate/ ) if you're going to do it.
It allows the aforementioned license "stretching" by giving you a tunable
retry time before it even invokes filePro, and you can specify a maximum
session count.  Say you have a 16 seat license.  You can save 4 seats for
development/debugging/cron jobs, and let 12 seats go to the web.  Of those,
under OneGate, say you tuned a retry time of 1 second, and a maximum
attempts of 30.  You get an extra 30 seconds of hang time on a request if
necessary, in which it will check once per second for a free "slot".  If it
can get a free slot as another request exits, it'll service the request(s)
pending, as long as it can find slots for them within the timeout
calculated time of a total of 30 seconds (as achieved by multiplying the
interval by the attempts).  If not, it lets you gracefully present a page
which can be customised to whatever you like.  You can extend your license
30-50%, maybe even more...not actually ever having more users than you paid
for, but extending the amount of pending requests you can handle by
pre-deferring them.

Additionally, with the new includes and mail-merge type features in OneGate
v5.x, you essentially get the ability to do that *nn replacement syntax as
you would in fPweb's methodology, but the behind-the-scenes coding is a lot
friendlier to deal with - it's all done with simple lookups.

I'm even working on an IPv6 version of the -application-level- firewall.
I've had an IPv4 one since v2.x or so.  I've been waiting a year for my
IPv6 address from my VPS provider (they had troubles with ARIN, troubles
with data center edge routers, etc., but I should have one soon).  It's
coded, but not tested under Apache and IIS yet because I haven't had a
server on which to test under IPv6.  It'll be done eventually.  Most people
are still on IPv4 yet, so it's not the biggest deal in the world.  At least
I -have- an application/task-level firewall. fPweb's methodology does not,
and fpcgi doesn't do squat for firewalling -or- user count prevention.  In
fact, it's totally -against- fP-Tech's best interests to include any sort
of pre-deferral to fpcgi, as they can make more money off filePro licensing
by letting filePro errors kill your CGI processes and just passively
waiting for you to beg them, cash in hand, to make it stop.

I seriously think you owe it to yourself and the project to look at the
OneGate product.  It's an extremely mature product for the purpose, and it
has more features than anything else out there you'd plug filePro into.
It's also arguably got the easiest model to deal with at this point, IMNSHO.

Bests,

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.