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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:

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.

Streaming CDN Types ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

Moon Base and Space Colonization - First we need fast InterPlanetary Internet ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

Introducing TOFFEE-Butterscotch - Save and Optimize your Internet/WAN bandwidth ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TOFFEE-Butterscotch yet another variant of TOFFEE can be used to save and optimize your Home/SOHO Internet/WAN bandwidth. Unlike TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) TOFFEE-Butterscotch is a non peer-to-peer (and asymmetric) network optimization solution. This makes TOFFEE-Butterscotch an ideal tool for all Home and SOHO users.

TEST CASES :: TEST RESULTS :: TOFFEE-Mocha-1.0.14 Development version ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021

TOFFEE-DataCenter WAN Optimization software development - Update: 19-Aug-2016 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
This is my next software development update of TOFFEE-DataCenter which I am working since past few weeks. I was very busy in implementing the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components along with prototyping, benchmarking, implementing and testing the same. However today is the first time ever I did a fresh new CLI interface for the upcoming new TOFFEE-DataCenter.

Watch on Youtube - [888//1] 280 WAN Optimization - Animated demo of Packet Optimization in TOFFEE-DataCenter ↗


TOFFEE-DataCenter Live Demo with Clash of Clans game data - 30-Aug-2016 ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
Today I have done a test setup so that I can able to connect my Android Samsung Tab via TOFFEE DataCenter. Below is my complete test topology of my setup. For demo (and research/development) context I configured TOFFEE DataCenter in engineering debug mode. So that I do not need two devices for this purpose.

Introducing TrueBench - a high resolution 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. With TrueBench Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 2B, Raspberry Pi 2 and other embedded SoC devices are benchmarked and you can do a comparative analysis with standard mainstream x86 devices.

TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) optimized Wireless Mesh-Networks - B.A.T.M.A.N [open-mesh.org (Open Mesh)] ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TOFFEE/TOFFEE-DataCenter can be used to optimize Ad-Hoc Mobile Wireless Mesh-Networks. To learn more about the same here are some references: B.A.T.M.A.N. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N. Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_ad_hoc_network Wireless ad hoc network (WANET) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network open-mesh.org (Open Mesh) Wiki - https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki

VPN Network Optimization via TOFFEE WAN Optimization ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
VPN Networks may degrade network performance due to various packet processing overheads such as encryption and by adding extra network protocol header(s) (such as IPv4/IPv6, IPSec, etc). This may inflate near MTU sized packets and causes excessive packet fragmentation. Here are the few examples of packet processing involved in a VPN (or a VPN like) Tunnel. With TOFFEE you can optimize these packets even before they get processed on to a VPN device. TOFFEE optimizes packet contents (application payload and transport headers) so that these TOFFEE optimized packets when they get processed by VPN devices (or VPN software stack) they may never need further packet fragmentation. Here is a deployment scenario of TOFFEE with VPN devices.



Featured Educational Video:
Watch on Youtube - [17365//1] 294 - VRF - Virtual Routing and Forwarding - Introduction ↗

The TOFFEE Project :: TOFFEE-Butterscotch :: Save and Optimize your Internet/WAN bandwidth ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
TOFFEE-Butterscotch is an open-source software which can be used to save and optimize your Internet/WAN bandwidth. Unlike TOFFEE (and TOFFEE-DataCenter) TOFFEE-Butterscotch is a non peer-to-peer (and asymmetric) network optimization solution. This makes TOFFEE-Butterscotch an ideal tool for all Home and SOHO users.

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

Off-Grid Solar Power System for Raspberry Pi ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
When you choose to use your Raspberry Pi device as your IoT based remote weather station or if you are building Linux kernel (like kernel compilation) within the same, you need a good uninterrupted power source (UPS). But if you are using it on site or in some research camping location you can choose to power your Raspberry Pi device with your custom off-grid solar power source.

VPN Network Optimization via TOFFEE WAN Optimization ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021
VPN Networks may degrade network performance due to various packet processing overheads such as encryption and by adding extra network protocol header(s) (such as IPv4/IPv6, IPSec, etc). This may inflate near MTU sized packets and causes excessive packet fragmentation. Here are the few examples of packet processing involved in a VPN (or a VPN like) Tunnel. With TOFFEE you can optimize these packets even before they get processed on to a VPN device. TOFFEE optimizes packet contents (application payload and transport headers) so that these TOFFEE optimized packets when they get processed by VPN devices (or VPN software stack) they may never need further packet fragmentation. Here is a deployment scenario of TOFFEE with VPN devices.




TOFFEE-DataCenter Download :: TOFFEE-DATACENTER-1.2.2-1-portable ↗
Saturday' 13-Mar-2021



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 [CDN]


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