WordPress MU

Hi everyone, I'm hoping someone can help me with this.

I was wondering how you would go about storing the files that users upload on a different server? I realise this is probably more an Apache question but it definitely affects how a MU system could be deployed.

This is the deployment scenario that I'm thinking of:

* A load balancer directs queries to a front-end webserver. * You could have multiple front-end webservers for redundancy, but these servers would only contain identical copies of the static MU Wordpress files.
* User-uploaded files are stored on a separate 'file-server' - this data can also be replicated for redundancy.
* The database is stored on a separate database server, or a cluster if required.

The bit that I'm not sure of is how the user-uploaded files (i.e. /wp-content/uploads/) could be stored seperately. Would you mount a network file share, or use some fancy htaccess work, or is there a better method?

Your suggestions are appreciated!

Cheers - Stuart.

i'm not sure exactly how wp.com does it but I have one server just for files. You really just have to write the code for this part from scratch as there really isn't a good example anywhere that I could find.

Most people do this with NFS.

yes, i was going to suggest NFS, because that would allow you to add more servers as neccesarry with only a little bit of modification.

Thanks for the ideas. I've found a howto that describes how to set up a highly available NFS server here: http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_nfs_drbd_heartbeat

Any tips on the MU Wordpress customisations??

you'd only need customizations if you're using multiple servers for other storage. each server would be mounted to a different folder within the files directory, then you'd need to either mofidy how the files are stored/retreived, or modify the newblog script (you can do this with a mu-plugin for ease) to make symbolic links to folders within the mounted folders for each blog, and also make sure php can follow sym links

So I could mount an NFS share to [..]/wp-inst/wp-content/blogs.dir and then each blog's directory would get created on the NFS share? Sounds too simple... Will try this in VMware...