I’ve been working on server configurations for getting my blog up and running, and thought maybe I could share my setup. I think someone out there may actually find it useful. So here goes…

I’m the type of person that likes to use vmware, and sometimes over use vm’s. For each client project I take on, I create a clone from a base image so I have a clean slate to start from. This way I don’t have to worry about conflicting configurations for different clients. It’s super easy and efficient, and it provides me with a dedicated server instance for each client. Ok, so the challenge I originally faced with doing that is exposing websites transparently on port 80 because of being behind a router/firewall, I had to choose a single machine on where to forward port 80. I chose my server that runs my vmware, but that wasn’t going to do me any good since each vmware instance has it’s own IP in my configuration (I use bridge networking, so each instance of a vm server acts just like a physically connected machine) and sending port 80 to the one server wasn’t going to determine which server to actually send the request to without having some sort of application to do that work for it. Well, one day in my research I came across Oracle’s Web Cache, which acts as a reverse proxy, and solves my problems. Now, I can forward my port 80 from my router to the server that’s running Oracle Web Cache, and in Oracle I setup the origin server, site definitions, and site-to-server mapping. What this gives me is the ability to have x number of servers behind my router/firewall, and each inbound request on port 80 is handled by the one server that’s running Oracle Web Cache which is responsible for proxying the request to it’s respective server. I spent a few years trying to accomplish this and researching, and it was just about a year ago or so that I came across the idea of reverse proxy and then found that Oracle Web Cache was exactly what I needed. In addition to this awesome benefit of reverse proxy, it provides performance increase by compression and caching, imagine that.

If anyone is interesting in me posting details on how-to config Oracle Web Cache for reverse proxy use, please leave a comment.