[Gllug] Question on mod_rewrite

[Tethys]

Simon Morris writes:

>Any comments on how sane this idea is will be particularly appreciated.

Non-trivial use of mod_rewrite is rarely sane[1], but it is incredibly
useful if you know what you're doing. What you've suggested seems to
be reasonably achievable with mod_rewrite, though, and I can't see any
obvious pitfalls.

>Especially any thoughts about the performance hit, and would caching the
>LDAP response be possible.

Performance hit should be negligible. LDAP (as its name implies) is a 
lightweight protocol, and unless you're expecting really significant
traffic, I'd not expect the overhead to be a problem.

One thing to consider, though -- why are you using LDAP? If it's just
to provide a key/value pair lookup for which webmail user is on which
server, then have you considered just using a local file (or for
speed, a Berkeley DB)? Even if the master data is in LDAP, you can
take an extract once a {day,hour,minute} as approptiate, and update
the static file on your server. That way, your're insured against LDAP
failures, and you're likely to get better performance as well.

Tet

[1] "Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo.
     Damned cool voodoo, but still voodoo."  -- Brian Moore

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