It's frustrating. Imagine you want to buy some low-cost,
dedicated servers (or virtualised servers). You will manage
these servers, but they will be hosted in a remote data
center. Now, you have a number of great choices if you want
to use Linux or Windows as your server operating system;
but what if you want to use Solaris? As far as I can see,
in that case, you have almost no choice at all…
If you
want to use Solaris, pretty much the only game in town for
high-quality, reasonably priced Solaris hosting is
Joyent's TextDrive service - specifically
their Accelerator Hosting offerings. Joyent is doing some
great things with Solaris and has put together some compelling
infrastructure (as well as having the advantage of employing
the mighty Ben
Rockwood). However, to my mind there's a potential issue
if you're doing anything that's at all CPU-intensive. And
that issue is: you get only a fraction of CPU in your Accelerator
(aka virtualised Solaris Zone). For $125 per month, you
get a guaranteed 1/16 (one sixteenth) of a CPU
(Update:
see comments it seems this might actually be 1/16 of total
CPU resources i.e. equivalent to 1/4 of a CPU core).
Now, I like Joyent's offering a lot - their infrastructure
design is incredibly elegant (not to mention, state-of-the-art).
There's no doubt about it, they're an impressive outfit.
However, if you want a completely dedicated CPU at a good
price, it would also be nice to be able to consider an offering
like that of ServerBeach. ServerBeach has
a great offering too. However, they take a different approach
to Joyent - using commodity hardware and simple infrastructure.
The net result of that is: for the same price as an entry-level
fractional CPU Solaris Accelerator Zone from Joyent, you
could get a completely dedicated server with 100% of an
Athlon XP2600 from ServerBeach. There's only one problem
- ServerBeach doesn't offer Solaris. I'm not sure why -
it's not like it would be either particularly difficult
or expensive.
So, there we have it… Why don't more hosting companies
offer Solaris?
Outside of work I'm also a member of a Comminity-based Samba band,
Meninos do Morumbi Oldham, along with my
son James. Like most people in the IT business, once people figure out
what you do you inevitably get requests to help with anything related to computers,
and I got collared to set up a website for the group. I started looking
around for hosting providers, and my original choice was
bluehost.com, based on the recommendation
of my colleague Phil.
However, the membership management application I'm also developing is written
in Java, which mean I really wanted to run
Tomcat on the
site as well, and bluehost didn't offer that option. Finding a hosting
provider who would host Tomcat at a reasonable price proved incredibly difficult
- the costs were way more than a non-profit like us could afford. Eventually
I stumbled across mod3, a UK-based hosting
provider who offer a
Solaris 10
zone for the princely sum of £9.95 per year, plus
pay-as-you-go for network bandwidth, disk space etc. The fact that
they were running Solaris appealed to me, and I was happy to risk the £10 involved
out of my own capacious pocket ;-) The base hosting package also came
with 660Mb of usable disk space, which was plenty for our needs.
After purchasing the site domain name and hosting I started to think about
what I wanted to put on the site. You get 64Mb of RSS memory with a base
zone config, which meant I needed to be fairly careful with what I ran on the
site. As I said, I knew I'd probably want use Tomcat at some point, so
I began to wonder if I could run the whole thing with Tomcat alone. From
previous experience of setting up similar websites before, I know that setting
up the site is relatively easy, the real problem is providing content, then
keeping it up-to-date and relevant. I also didn't want to become the bottleneck
for making changes to she site, which pretty much meant that I needed to use
some sort of
Content Management
System, so that I could give other members of the group the ability to edit
content. Nearly everyone in the organisation is a non-IT type (one of
the attractions of the group for me ;-), so whatever I used had to make editing
easy - requiring that people hack on raw HTML was a non-starter.
As part of the day job I'm looking at the possibility of using a
CMS for part of the OpenSolaris website,
so I'd already been looking around at what was available (and free!).
I didn't need an 'Enterprise level' CMS - features such as versioning, content
staging, multilingual support or workflow management weren't necessary, what
I needed was something easy for users to understand, and that didn't have huge
resource requirements. And being written in Java was a bonus, as it meant
I could then run it under the Tomcat instance I already knew I was going to
need for the membership management stuff.
My final choice was
MeshCMS, and I've been extremely happy with it. It hit all the key
requirements that I had - simple to deploy (single WAR file, no database required),
easy to customise, structures the site using the directory/subdirectory paradigm
that any PC user is already familiar with, has an integrated
WYSIWYG editor for editing content, and the clincher - has very modest resource
requirements and fits inside my 64Mb RSS constraint. MeshCMS has been
exceedingly well thought out - designing the look and feel of the site involves
just modifying a single JSP template, which is then applied to all the pages.
The site navigation menus are all automatically generated from the layout of
the directory hierarchy used to store the page content, and most-frequently
accessed pages bubble to the top of the menus. Linking to other pages
in the site is easy - the integrated editor provides a dynamically-generated
list of pages that you can select from. The editor even provides a list
of the styles defined in the site stylesheet for you to select from - a feature
that Roller (the package used
to run blogs.sun.com) could well do with emulating.
Having decided on the CMS, the next task was to see if I could minimise Tomcat's
footprint as far as possible. Tomcat runs as a normal Unix process, and
so doesn't have permission to open low-numbered ports (below 1024), which is
why by default it runs on port 8080. Webservers normally run on port 80,
and using that port requires root privilege. The
Apache webserver gets around this problem
by starting up as root, opening port 80 then switching user to the webserver
user before starting to serve pages. However Tomcat is written in Java,
so Unix-centric mechanisms like switching user aren't an option. The normal
way to get around this is to put Tomcat behind Apache, using the
mod_jk
module to shunt traffic between the two. However because of my memory
constraints, I wanted to avoid using Apache if at all possible. There
are a number of fairly vile
hacks for doing this for Linux, including stuff such as firewall or userland
port redirection, but most of them suffer from various
problems.
However because I was running on Solaris, I had a far better option.
I was already intending to run Tomcat as a
SMF service, and one of the lesser-known features of SMF is that it is integrated
with the Least Privilege mechanism in Solaris 10, which allows you to grant
elevated privileges to normal user processes in a controlled way. This
meant that allowing Tomcat to open port 80 simply required granting it the
net_privaddr privilege:
<method_credential user='meninos' group='staff'
privileges='basic,net_privaddr' />
The really neat thing is that I didn't have to give the meninos user the
net_privaddr privilege permanently, it only needs it for the duration
of the service start method. The full service manifest is available
here if you want to use it yourself.
So, if you are ever in the Greater Manchester area, check out our
performances page on the
website
and if you get a chance, pop by and hear us play ;-) We were out
busking in Manchester
yesterday,
and for once the weather was kind, despite the time of year :-)
Posted by alanbur ( Nov 27 2006, 10:54:59 AM GMT )
Permalink
Comments [5]
Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/alanbur/entry/hosting_a_community_website_on
Comments:
Very cool. Do you get a memory allowance of 64M of application RSS +
the memory taken up by the various OS components running in the zone
(init, svc.startd, svc.configd, sshd, etc) or does everything running
in the zone have to be under 64M to avoid additional charges? The smallest
I've ever stripped a zone down to is about 25M or so of RSS.
Hi Alan. Did you consider GlassFish instead of Tomcat, or did you think
it would exceed the 64MB limit? - eduard/o
They are using rcapd to enforce the RSS limit, so the RSS of stuff that
you aren't using tends to get paged out.
Yes, I did consider Glassfish, but the starting recommendation is 256Mb
of memory and 250Mb of disk for Glassfish, which made it a non-starter.
You may (or may not!) be interested to know that Mod3 are sponsoring
the UK Unix User Group Spring conference next week (20th & 21st March)
in Manchester. I think they are doing something on Solaris Zones too
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