Afterburner Configuration

To help you set up your own Afterburner site, let's look in detail at two sample setups. We'll use FreeBSD, since that's the best OS for serious web serving. The first sample will be for a plain old single-domain site. Most of these steps require you to be root.

• Install.
  First, unpack the tarchive. Install the executables in /usr/local/sbin:

  cp afterburner dolog /usr/local/sbin
  

• Create web tree.
  Make the directory where Afterburner will run, and the subdirectory for your HTML and image files:

  mkdir /usr/local/www
  mkdir /usr/local/www/data
  

  Your config file and log files will go in /usr/local/www. When you get a license file, it goes there too.

• Startup script.
  FreeBSD wants /usr/local daemons to get started by a shell script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. We have included a sample startup script you can use, so copy it to that directory:

  cp afterburner.sh /usr/local/etc/rc.d
  

  The script tells Afterburner to get the rest of its configuration from /usr/local/www/afterburner_config.

• Config file.
  Putting config stuff in a file like this, instead of doing it as command-line flags in the startup script, means you can make configuration changes without editing an executable. So, copy the sample config file to /usr/local/www:

  cp afterburner_config /usr/local/www
  

  The sample config file just specifies a PID file - for saving the process i.d. that Afterburner is running under, so that it can be more easily restarted.

• Log files.
  Afterburner logs its transfers in two files called "log" and "log.index". The dolog program is provided for converting these into standard log format. You will want to rotate the logs, so they don't get overly large. We have provided a sample script that rotates seven days worth of logs and then tells Afterburner to restart and begin writing a fresh log. You can have the script run automatically every night by installing it in /etc/periodic/daily:

  cp 500.afterburner-rotate /etc/periodic/daily
  

And that's it. Reboot and you should be up and running.

Now, what if you want to serve multiple domains? With HTTP/1.1 you can do "name based" virtual domains, which are very easy to set up.

• DNS.
  Name-based virtual hosts are set up via the domain name system. You make a CNAME record (which is basically an alias) for each virtual host pointing at the real host. A full explanation of DNS and BIND is way beyond the scope of this document, but if you just tell your local DNS person that you want to make some CNAMEs, they'll know what to do.

• Config file.
  All you have to do here is add the "vhost" option to your afterburner_config file.

• Data directory.
  The data dir for a vhost system is different. The top level directory should not contain any HTML stuff. Instead all it contains is subdirectories, one per virtual host. The directory's name is just the virtual hostname, or an IP number The HTML for each host goes in its subdirectory. The vhost directory for my own secondary web server looks like this:

  lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  www   13 Nov 15 11:32 192.100.66.6@ -> gate.acme.com
  lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  www   13 Nov 15 11:32 63.197.234.19@ -> gate.acme.com
  drwxrwxr-x   3 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:15 gate.acme.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.axilla.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:16 www.cloaca.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.foetid.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.lirpa.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.maxnix.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.phoon.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.setuid.com/
  drwxrwxr-x   2 root  www  512 Nov 15 12:04 www.tranya.com/
  

  The server's "real" name is gate.acme.com, and I added symbolic links for its two IP numbers. In addition there are directories for all the virtual hosts I'm serving.