Would anyone happen to know of an application / project that is able to monitor a series of directories on a web server.
We currently develop sites using Coldfusion 10, and would like a method or script or even application that actively monitors websites for any modifications to any files and automatically notifies administrators of any time someone or something has made an alteration to a file.
If Coldfusion is possible for this, that would be even better and any advice on how to to monitor directories would also be greatly appreciated
There's an example of a directory watcher gateway in the docs: "Using the example event gateways and gateway applications".
Google about for issues people have had with it though. before diving in.
Related
I am playing with node.js and angular for first time. I use shared server hosting space. I am trying to get some node.js tests running.
CPanel seem to provide interface to deploy node applications. Example:
application url: myurl.com
application root: node-hello-world
application startup file: app.js
This seems to create directory and some artifacts in
/home/myurl/nodevenv/node-hello-world/6/bin
I have (limited?) shell access through Cpanel emulation, however I get error on source command.
source activate
got error: error: jailshell: fork: Cannot allocate memory
Does this mean node.js is installed and ready to run? Do I have to upload project as well? Where to? Trying to find more info on process of deploying to this type of server if possible.
sorry for nooby question.
Googling your error message, I came across this thread -- which admittedly is very old, but it's from cPanel and has the following comment from an administrator at the time:
Jailshell is a constrained environment by design. It is not meant to be a replacement for a full-featured, unrestricted, shell environment, such as is provided by Bash. If your user's need such full-featured environments then perhaps they need full shell access, or another method whereby they can accomplish their goal.
That answer was given in 2006 (yes, 13 years ago) but I have to imagine the spirit of that response is still true.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be afraid to use any shared hosting provider that would give you more than very limited shell to use -- it opens the door to many security vulnerabilities, and if multiple customers are in the same runtime (i.e. shared hosting) it could be catastrophic. Maybe your host does allow this, or maybe what you're describing isn't actually the same thing I'm referring to... you didn't offer a lot of details on this point.
Back to your question: Does this mean node.js is installed and ready to run? Do I have to upload project as well? Where to?
If I had to guess, Node probably isn't installed (it isn't in most shared hosting providers) -- but I can't say for sure based on the information you provided. My recommendation would be to call their customer support. Or pay for a dedicated hosting account where you get root access. Or just use something like Heroku.
I'm a front end developer about to join a project team working with Service Fabric to build a Web Front End to their microservice driven application.
One of the problems I've been having in my own research is that when working with local Service Fabric Clusters, I have to redeploy my Application to test if something does or doesn't work in my Web App. This slows down developer velocity massively, as the process will only take longer and longer as other Back End services are added. I largely work with the Web App communicating to an API Gateway Service (GraphQL.NET).
What I'd like to know is if there's a way to run a local Web Application out outside of a Service Fabric cluster, but still have it communicate to one. This would allow my front end developer tool chain to remain intact, and develop at a much faster pace with incremental building and live-reload tools.
Of course, if anyone's come up with any better solution to the problem, I'd love to hear about it! ;)
We have a javascript front end (so this may not be applicable to you)- which means that there's a ton of front end library files etc. This was a nightmare to copy across to the cluster for testing and took forever. Theres a couple of ways I've been able to speed things up.
One is by keeping all the front end files in a separate project and using a build step to copy them across into the asp.net core project. So only the bundled/minified files are copied into the cluster when deploying.
Another option is to host these front-end files with a local node http-server which watches for changes etc and keep a static environment file where you can set the ip/hostname of your local cluster thats running. I use fiddler to redirect the hostname to the local ip, this way you can use the urls that you will use in production, which is handy. You'll need to set up cors though, which wasn't a problem for us.
So yes, definitely possible.
In the Azure Management Portal, you can configure your website. As an example, you can change the PHP version your website is using. When you have edited a configuration option, you have to click “Save”.
So far, so good. But you also have the option to restart your site (by clicking “Restart“ next to “Save”).
My question is, when should you restart your website? Are there some configuration changes that require a restart, and others that don't? I haven't found any hints in the user interface.
Are there other situations that require a restart? Say, the website has been running for a given time without a restart?
Also, what are the consequences of restarting a website? Does it affect cookies/sessions in any way (i.e. delete a user's shopping cart or log them out)? Are there any other consequences I should be aware of?
Generally speaking, you may want to restart your website because of application performance issues. For example, you may have a memory leak in your application, connections not getting closed, or other things that would degrade the performance of the application over time. As you monitor your website and observe conditions like this you may make a decision to restart it. Even better, you may even automate the task of restarting when these conditions occurr. Anyway, these kinds of things are not unique to Azure Websites. You would take similar actions for a website running on-premises.
As for configuration changes, if you make a change to your web.config file, this change is detected and your website would be restarted automatically for you. Similarily, if you were to make configuration changes in the CONFIG page of your website in the Azure Management Portal such as application settings, connection strings, etc., then Azure Websites will detect this change to your environment and automatically restart it.
Indeed, restarting a website will result in any session data kept in memory being lost for that instance. Additionally, if you have startup/initialization code that takes time to complete then that will have to be rerun. Again, this is not anything unique to Azure Websites though.
I was given this interesting task in my new job of setting up an automated report on page hits for a site loadbalanced on seperate IIS servers. My first choice in terms of which software to use is AWStats as I am familiar with it from my Apache past but I wasn't sure what would be the best way of combining the stats between the two servers. Merging log files, pre AWStats with a script or 3rd party app? Possibly a setting within IIS? or maybe AWStats can do this itself? RegEx?
Forgive my ignorance, your answers are greatly appreciated, I would love to know your thoughts.
I just finished writing a console app that we will run nightly with the task scheduler to merge the log files from the different servers we have on the load balancer.
We ended up using Outlook in background mode on our azure server and ran a 3rd party app that processes attachments. Has been up for a week with no issues. I recommend if you go down this path you monitor it using an app such as Zabbix or Nagios.
I have a Windows application that does some calculations and is called from command line. On my Windows machine, I have a PHP script running under Apache that executes the application and shows the output.
Is there any hosting solution that I can use to do the same? I can't figure out if EC2 or Azure are the right solutions. Basically, I need a web server + ability to execute my application.
Suggestions? Thanks.
You can host your application on AppHarbor, the .NET Platform-as-a-Service. You can either port your web frontend to .NET or try to get your PHP stuff working with Phalanger. AppHarbor is working on Background Tasks, which might be a good match for your workload.
I would just run the PHP script you already have under IIS in a Windows Azure web role.
If it is a Windows Application and you have the source code I would go with an Azure Worker Role. The advantage of using a PaaS (as Azure) instead of an IaaS (as Amazon) is that you wont have to bother of keeping the server up to date.
The real investment in time will be when you rewrite your application to make it work as a Worker Role. The time needed to do this work depends on how your application works right now. If is uses a lot of disc access it might be difficult and perhaps an Amazon server would be better. But if it only crunches numbers in memory an Azure Worker Role is a very good candidate.
The real advantage of using an Amazon server is that you probably wont need to do any work at all. Except maintaining the server.
As described in the question both Azure and EC2 will do the job very well. This is the kind of task both systems are designed for.
So the question becomes really: which is best? That depends on two things: what the application needs to do and your own experience and preference.
As it's a Windows application there should probably be a leaning towards Azure. While EC2 supports Windows, the tooling and support resources for Azure are probably deeper at this point.
If cost is a factor then a (somewhat outdated) resource is here: http://blog.mccrory.me/2010/10/30/public-cloud-hourly-cost-comparison/ -- the conclusion is that, by and large, Azure and Amazon are roughly similar for compute charges.
Steve Marx has a blog post that describes how to run another web server (i.e not IIS) on Azure
This potentially has everything you need - you can deploy Apache and your executable and run it in exactly the same way.
Alternatively - you can deploy your executable along side a bit of code in a worker role that would run that application periodically, all depending on your exact requirements