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RESEARCH 》 Building my own CDN - Moving away from Joomla to non-Joomla website - Update: 01-Oct-2016

Its been a roller-coaster month (the entire Sep-2016), if you understand and believe in astrology you may well know the reason why. There are couple of eclipses and then there is the Mercury retrograde. Mercury retrograde started around in the month of Aug-30th and it was straight by around Sep-22-25th-2016. If there is a Mercury retrograde we need to be prepared to face any sort of equipment damage, equipment breakdown, downtime, loss of data, hard-disk corruption and so on. And coincidentally we can see there are lot of Samsung's exploding Galaxy Note 7s and exploding Samsung Washing-machine incidents.

Strangely I too had an issue with the entire The TOFFEE Project website (on 25-Sep-2016). Seems there are couple of Inmotionhosting servers are down. And one of the server includes The TOFFEE Project website hosted server. I was in touch with the Inmotionhosting team trying to resolve the same. I found a unique issue that all my website files are intact and the Joomla database. But the Joomla database tables are completely wiped out and missing. Besides there is also a sort of upgrade going on in their servers. Once I communicated with them they requested me to authorize so that they can restore the database from their existing backups. They informed me that they take backups at specific intervals. But no one is sure if that includes recent periodic changes I did in the website.

Luckily I have the most recent backup of the entire website. And just couple of days before this downtime I did couple of minor changes and I forgot to take the full site backup after this change. Luckily this change is trivial. So I requested them to ignore my request. And I gone ahead and restored the Joomla database myself from my own snapshot/backup which I had it in my NAS. From that moment I decided I am done with Joomla. I need to move away from Joomla to non-Joomla The TOFFEE Project website.

And in case if you guys are using Inmotionhosting hosting, then at any given point in time they have this great page http://status.inmotionhosting.com. This shows the live status of the Inmotionhosting. If there is any network or server issue they will list here. And before you contact their customer support you can once check the status of your hosted server here. In most cases they may be well aware of this situation/issue and may display over here.
Live Status Inmotionhosting

Moving away from Joomla: The site on that day is completely down for around 12-hours. Since I am anyway thinking about building my own CDN, this incident is a great learning curve. Joomla is great in terms of managing small to medium website(s). But since Joomla manages your content in the database it is an added stress to the server for each page request. And if there is an issue with the database, the site will completely vanish in a blink of an eye. As it happened in my case too. And during this time it will show a nasty mysql connect issue error which looks embarrassing and ugly. And this happens if there is excess load on the server or the database engine.

Besides it is also cumbersome in Joomla managing additional components such as customized tables, scripts, frames, etc. There are workarounds, but it is often inflexible, redundant and cumbersome. And this is the case happened to me while I was inserting Google Adsense ADs. The ADs are appearing out of the article boundary in smart-phones and tabs especially in the portrait mode. I got a warning from the Google Adsense team about it. But I was completely clueless how to solve this weired issue in Joomla. Luckily I found a solution that there are these Responsive ADs which addresses this problem. Finally after I did changes things started looking better. Apart from this there are also issues in case if you are looking for any extensive customization in terms of managing your article categories, etc. Not that they are impossible in Joomla, but they are tricky to do so and you need to repeat these steps all over again for each article/category.

Joomla is troublesome when you are building your own CDN too. Since you cannot extensively control the dynamic links/resources/etc. However if you purchase third-party CDN services, by installing Joomla extensions/plug-ins you can deploy over a CDN. But it is still tricky and challenging. In my case it is out of question. So this is also one of the reasons I took a decision to move away from Joomla and build my own PHP-based website from scratch.

Screenshot of old The TOFFEE Project website built with Joomla:
Screenshot of old The TOFFEE Project website built with Joomla

and as you know here is the screenshot of the The TOFFEE Project website built from scratch with PHP:
Screenshot of old The TOFFEE Project website built from scratch with PHP

While this transition I have also changed the Logo and the theme from Brown to vibrant Orange. With this change the website looks spacious, dynamic, vibrant, and the orange theme allows the website links stand out unlike the old brown theme links. Since it is entirely custom written website it is easy in future to write further automated scripts to spread the website (contents/resources) on a custom built CDN infrastructure. We can load-share, redirect/point images/resources to different dedicated CDN node(s), if the main website is facing glitches, we can redirect to different CDN node(s). We can host multiple CDN nodes on multiple web-hosting provider servers. We can even modify the DNS-entry to point to a different hosting server whenever it is needed or if the main site (hosting server) is down.

Here is my live video log of the same:



Suggested Topics:


Generic CDN


Building my own CDN

💎 TOFFEE-MOCHA new bootable ISO: Download
💎 TOFFEE Data-Center Big picture and Overview: Download PDF


Recommended Topics:

Demo TOFFEE-DataCenter WAN Optimization packaging feature ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

Communication data network standards and data transfer speeds :: Chart ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Here is a complete chart comprising popular communication data network standards and their respective transfer rates. I hope this reference chart will help network engineers and network software developers while performing networking tests and experiments, building WAN/network products, building WAN simulated networks of a specific standard and so on. This may also helps us to track technological advancements of communication data networks.

TrueBench - Linux CPU Benchmarking system ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TrueBench is an unique open-source benchmarking system in which the core system performance and efficiency parameters are measured at extreme high resolution in the order of several million/billion ยต-seconds for a given specific task. TrueBench is a part of The TOFFEE Project research.

TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) deployment with VPN devices ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
In case if you need to deploy TOFFEE along with your existing VPN devices you can deploy the same as shown below. This will allow your VPN devices to encrypt your TOFFEE WAN Optimized network data. NOTE: Make sure about the VPN deployment topology done in the right order. Else TOFFEE (LAN side) may get VPN encrypted packets which may not be possible (and or difficult) to further optimize. Hence always make sure to deploy them in a topology suggested below so that TOFFEE devices are out of VPN tunnel.

WAN Optimization - Animated demo of Packet Optimization in TOFFEE-DataCenter ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

Introducing TOFFEE-DataCenter ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TOFFEE TOFFEE Data-Center is specifically meant for Data Center, Cluster Computing, HPC applications. TOFFEE is built in Linux Kernel core. This makes it inflexible to adapt according to the hardware configuration. It does sequential packet processing and does not scale up well in large multi-core CPU based systems (such as Intel Xeon servers, Core i7 Extreme Desktop systems,etc). Apart from this since it is kernel based, if there is an issue in kernel, it may crash entire system. This becomes a challenge for any carrier grade equipment (CGE) hardware build.

Watch on Youtube - [889//1] 280 WAN Optimization - Animated demo of Packet Optimization in TOFFEE-DataCenter ↗


TOFFEE Download :: TOFFEE-1.1.70-1-portable ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

Building my own CDN - choosing a web-hosting to deploy my CDN - Update: 28-July-2016 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
The TOFFEE Project website is hosted on Inmotion Hosting. And so I am looking for alternate hosting provider to build my first CDN node. My plan is to make multiple sub-domains of my website such as cdn1.the-toffee-project.org, cdn2.the-toffee-project.org and point each of this corresponding subdomain(s) to various alternative web hosting servers geographically spread across the world. Sometimes choosing the same vendor for multiple CDN nodes may result multiple servers existing in the data-center. And this becomes an issue if there is some catastrophic network disaster.

TOFFEE-Mocha-1.0.32-1-x86_64 and TOFFEE-Mocha-1.0.32-1-i386 Code Release ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
This is my first TOFFEE-Mocha combined x86-64 and i386 (Intel x86 64-bit and 32-bit) code release.

TOFFEE Data-Center optimized Internet of Things (IoT) Platform ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021



Featured Educational Video:
Watch on Youtube - [8613//1] x254 Kernel Init Code without Kernel Module - Kernel Programming Tip #linode ↗

TOFFEE-Butterscotch Documentation :: TOFFEE-Butterscotch-1.0.11-rpi2-23-nov-2016 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TOFFEE-Butterscotch Documentation :: TOFFEE-Butterscotch-1.0.11-rpi2-23-nov-2016

TOFFEE-DataCenter with GlusterFS Storage Cluster ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

TOFFEE-Mocha Documentation :: TOFFEE-Mocha-1.0.14-1-x86_64 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

TOFFEE-DataCenter screenshots on a Dual CPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz - Dell Server ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021




TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) deployment in Large Infrastructure and or ISP Networks ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Large Infrastructure or ISP setup: In case if you are an ISP and interested in deploying a large customer WAN Optimized network or an add-on enhanced (WAN Optimized) network for select few customers, then you can deploy something as shown below. Although this case is not meant for hobby/DIY users. This is a feasible solution for high-end professional application and the same can be deployed.



Research :: Optimization of network data (WAN Optimization) at various levels:
Network File level network data WAN Optimization


Learn Linux Systems Software and Kernel Programming:
Linux, Kernel, Networking and Systems-Software online classes


Hardware Compression and Decompression Accelerator Cards:
TOFFEE Architecture with Compression and Decompression Accelerator Card


TOFFEE-DataCenter on a Dell Server - Intel Xeon E5645 CPU:
TOFFEE-DataCenter screenshots on a Dual CPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz - Dell Server