[Zope] management interface with VHM on cluster?

[Jack Coates]

Hi,

I have two Linux machines, both running Zope at 8080 and Apache at 80
with ProxyPass redirects to Zope. MachineA runs four virtual hosts
behind a single IP. A nightly rsync copies the entire zope tree from
MachineA to MachineB. Both machines use VHM/SiteRoot to return
www.hostname.tld, and one of the virtual sites is load-balanced with
round-robin DNS of the www record. I'd like to eventually balance all
the domains.

My question is, how does anyone else doing this make sure that the
management interface is on a single machine? I haven't sat down with
ethereal to verify exactly what happens when using
http://MachineA.domain.tld/manage, but I can certainly say that if one
goes to http://www.domain.tld/manage, you might get MachineB and have
your changes wiped out that night. I suspect that going to
MachineA.domain.tld isn't going to help, since the SiteRoot will return
www.domain.tld URLs and force another DNS lookup.

The best idea I've had so far is to set up SSL and force the management
interface to go through 443. However, I'm still pretty fuzzy on all the
details -- I've read the documentation, but it's single-host.

Next best idea is to use SSH tunneling to get at the management
interface via webdav or ftp and disable web management over the Internet
entirely. This is easy enough to do, but tough to support for other
developers. 

Any better ideas?

thanks,
-- 
Jack Coates
Monkeynoodle: A Scientific Venture...