photos.case.edu now hosted by USG
Awhile back, Brian Latko expressed an interested in the photos.case.edu project I started and the possibility of integrating its services into USG’s web development. Most notably, he wanted to use the system to store USG event related photos and pull content off of the site to display on plasma tv screens located throughout the campus. I knew this idea would take off sometime! I’m proud to say that this evening, I worked with Greg Szorc and Andrew Witte to transfer the service over to the USG webserver.
In order to create a ’seamless’ transition of service, Greg Szorc and I contacted ‘hostmaster’, the DNS admin for Case, and had him setup a CNAME on the USG server for “photos-dev.case.edu”. Next, Greg installed an identicle copy of the photos.case.edu website. On the photos.case.edu website, I simply created an .htaccess file with this mod_rewrite reverse proxy command. (Be sure to to enable apache2’s proxy modules in the httpd.conf and add -D PROXY to your configuration file):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://photos-dev.case.edu/$1 [L,P]
It works like a charm. Users don’t even realize that when they request photos.case.edu, they are secretly getting content from photos-dev.case.edu (the USG server)! Check it out - the URL never changes! God I love mod_rewrite.
The next steps will include a final transition the CNAME of photos.case.edu to the USG server. This will be quite complicated, as I have tied a number of student group websites (thereview.case.edu, footlighters.case.edu, caseems.case.edu) and IP addresses to this server. Once it is all said and done, Andrew Witte might look into creating a webservice that allows various organizations to access a direct API to our system to upload content and retrieve XML information on various photos. This will allow seamless integration with USG, UPB, and many others. So exciting!