[HCoop-Discuss] future infrastructure discussion: static web hosting

[David Crawshaw]

Hey guys, I have a question I would like to put to other hcoop
members: how much interest is there in static web hosting?

I know that almost everyone here does something dynamic on mire. I do
too. But most of my needs are covered by .html (and other) files in a
directory, being available over http. The issues we have had recently
would not bother me at all if my static pages had stayed up. How true
is this for other hcoop'ers?

So, independent of the AFS discussion I would like to ask: is there
any interest in devoting a machine to static hosting? It could run
something like lighthttpd and an AFS client and nothing else. It could
have a single AFS user, something like static.daemon, and users could
give it read access to directories it can share, and configure it
through domtool. This keeps the complexity low.

If there is interest in such a machine, I would be willing to donate
time to make it happen. I would be willing to make any modifications
necessary to domtool and get the software side of the server online.
So far I don't have any useful opinions on hardware or hosting or AFS,
but I would like to think that simple static hosting is compatible
with any other infrastructure decisions.

d.