Summit360

Just to add to this as I'm sure we're not alone... I've reached the end of the economic line for a single VPS. I count myself lucky the provider is excellent and very few SPOF incidents. I don't wish to move to a single commodity dedicated server, I'm going horizontal. Using any of the leading VPS providers there is a 'private' network which isn't actually 'private'. A couple do offer it. A VPN would be the only solution that works at any host, based on your feedback @Lindywhich is more complex to setup and manage than certificates. I don't think it's unreasonable for us to have a way of securely connecting to our database servers out of the box, others manage it. Issuing certs and distributing them isn't really a challenge. With the rise of tools like RDS and other 'remote' cloud services, we're increasingly connected beyond the idilic single server setup. As @Johno2518 says, transport security is the key. Because even in a private world, it's not if, but when! I'm probably going to solve this with either editing the core files, or following plan A with running Maria in a cluster and still having a 'localhost' connection. Its far better now than it used to be ? i.e. it works without needing a full-time dba to keep it running ?

Just a quick note for anyone running sphinx on a server other than the forums server. The configuration file that is built by IPB is correct for 99% of the time, except in a multiserver install where remote hosts will connect to the sphinx install on a different server to that of the web, you need to change one line, the address line in searchd: searchd { #address = 127.0.0.1 address = vlan ip or listening ip port = 3312 log = /var/sphinx/log/searchd.log query_log = /var/sphinx/log/query.log read_timeout = 5 max_children = 30 pid_file = /var/sphinx/log/searchd.pid max_matches = 1000 seamless_rotate = 0 preopen_indexes = 0 unlink_old = 1 } By using address = 127.0.0.1 sphinx only listens to localhost, thus your web nodes will return no results despite being indexed. Hope this helps.

Rob, There is a quite straightforward and effective strategy I've used with my Vbulletin forum. I will be repeating it for the IBP forum I am migrating to. This crowd offers a great CDN service that is very easy to setup. www.simplecdn.com is who I've been using for a couple of months now. They start of by giving you 15$ worth of credit to experiment with. Once you are happy you can apply for a CNAME extension, these actually cost $25SUD and it's the point where you have to part with money. Since July it has cost me 100$ (added to account) however I have 77$ left on my account, you have to prepay before your 15$free runs out. I've just paid a transit charge of 0.38$ for 9.78Gb of usage. I'm using a mirror bucket and you can vary the cache time, it's really simple, you change the asset url e.g. js or css to there server. The first time the asset is requested, the mirror will connect and cache the file and then serve the file, thereafter it's all on there cache till it expires. You can also use both gzip and non-gzip'd mirrors along with different hour caches settings, for example: 1 Hour Expire; gzip Enabled 1 Hour http://xxx.lg1x3z.simplecdn.net/ 3 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 3 Hours http://xxx.lg1x4z.simplecdn.net/ 6 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 6 Hours http://xxx.lg1x5z.simplecdn.net/ 12 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 12 Hours http://xxx.lg1x6z.simplecdn.net/ 24 Hours Expire; gzip Enabled 24 Hours http://xxx.lg1x8z.simplecdn.net/ 7 Days Expire; gzip Enabled 7 Days for images with IPB it appears you could edit the image url in general config (v3.0.#) for other assets css, js and so on there might be a little more editing to be done. Hope his helps, it has for me :)