One project I worked on recently required to set up a mongrel cluster on Webfaction. On a typical Rails setup, I have a mongrel cluster running under apache2. I thought it would be easy to set this up on Webfaction, but it wasn’t so straight forward, so I’m going to document it here.

First, the one-click rails app on webfaction assumes you will run one mongrel server per application. However, in order to handle multiple instances with load balancing, we will need to make some changes. The setup is not too complicated, but we need to run our own apache2. But before you install additional software, you should first make sure your app runs on the server with one instance of mongrel. Once you do that, you can follow the instructions below.

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Today was a good day. Not only did I win Solitaire on my iPod on a train down to Providence, I fixed a mailserver issue that I’ve been struggling with for a few weeks.

I’m slowly switching over to Slicehost for all my web hosting requirements, and setting up the server (I’m running Ubuntu Hardy) so that I can get rid of all the other hosting I use (I already got rid of crappy Dreamhost). I’ve been using Pair for the last ten years and have been really happy with them, but I’m a server junkie. VPS is just too tasty. Anyway, most server stuff is pretty straight forward to set up. Pickled Onion articles and a bunch of howtoforge docs will get you started from a fresh disk image in no time. One thing that tripped me up was setting up the mail server. I wanted the standard PostfixAdmin controlled virtual user setup using MySQL to manage the users. Following this and this got everything working, except SMTP would not authenticate properly when storing passwords encrypted in the database.

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