Apache <-> mongrel cluster; nearly there but

Ok, after the earlier weirdness with stopping my mongrel cluster I’ve
now got things to the point where I’m working on the Apache proxy and
after following the instructions from various sources, it doesn’t work.

Most everyone says to set up

<VirtualHost *:80>
and so on

But that just blows out Apache 2.2.8 with a complaint about “can’t mix *
ports with non * ports”. To elminate that error I put the host name or
ip address in place of the *. Then most everyone’s instructions assumes
that there’s a directory “logs” inside /etc/apache2, but on Ubuntu 8.04
Apache 2.2.8 keeps it’s logs in /var/log/apache2 so those instructions
have to be changed for that config.

The final killer is that having done all that the proxy balancer is now
refusing to pass on the request. The error logs show

[error] [client 192.168.1.15] client denied by server configuration:
proxy:balancer://mongrel_cluster/chapter4

the mongrel cluster is set up as

Taken from p 156 of Deploying Rails Applications

<Proxy balancer://mongrel_cluster>
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8000
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8001
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8002

Oddly, even though I’m starting the mongrels on 127.0.0.1 I can access
them on the machine’s public address so 192.168.1.12:8000/something lets
me in, but 192.168.1.12/something blows me out with the above error in
the logs.

Any ideas? Or should I give up and use Passenger?

John S.

John S. wrote:

etc

Any ideas? Or should I give up and use Passenger?

John S.

I gave up and used Passenger. It took maybe 5 minutes to install and get
working. It does what it says on the tin without a lot of faffing about.

When I’ve got a spare moment, well more like spare hours or days, I’ll
go back and get Apache to proxy a mongrel cluster so I can put it on my
resume to show I’m really hard core, I dream in hex, and code by waving
magnets over my hard disk. I doubt that I’d actually use Mongrel unless
I was running a really big site that needed to have Apache and Mongrel
on separate machines.

Lesson Learned. Don’t use Mongrel unless you’re being paid by the hour,
in which case you can really rack up the bills.