[Discuss] Whence distributed operating systems?

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 01:05:38PM -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> Programs must be designed such that multiple instances of themselves can
> run on monolithic architectures. Sounds simple? It's not. Take Apache
> (the web server) for example. How do you get two different instances of
> Apache with different configurations, different sets of modules,
> different everything, running on one host? Now scale that to any number
> of instances.

Apache is easy. It's out-of-the-box on Debian, and one of the
things that Tuttle manages superbly.

(The Debian method is se set up so that /etc/apache2-NAME is a
completely different copy of apache, and will be controlled by 
apache2ctl-NAME, handle its own config in /etc/apache2-NAME, 
and so forth. The only thing left to sysadmin whim is making
sure that they Listen on different IP/port combos.

... actually, now I'm trying to think of a service that isn't
manageable that way. BIND, if you insist on using rndc. And ntpd
needs careful attention to make sure they don't all try to
manage the system clock.

But lots of services are designed to do that sort of hotel
service well, especially if you have a separate IP available for
every instance.

-dsr-

-dsr-