Confused about rewrite links option.

[MikeR]

I have two servers, production and backup.

I index on my production server and I would merely like to copy the zoom files over to my backup server and use them there. Of course on the backup server all the URLs are for the production server.

Do I run Zoom on the backup server and click the rewrite links option?

Do I need to just edit the zoom_pagedata.zdat file and do a "replace all" on the URL?

Do I need to spider twice on the production server? 1 normally and 1 with rewrite links (with the backup URL in).

Thanks

[Ray]

I have two servers, production and backup.

I index on my production server and I would merely like to copy the zoom files over to my backup server and use them there. Of course on the backup server all the URLs are for the production server.

Do I run Zoom on the backup server and click the rewrite links option?

Can you give us example URLs for your production and backup servers?

I can't quite imagine a scenario where the live and backup server would have different URLs. Usually, a backup server would only be put into action by pointing the domain name to it, and so the end user would not be aware of a backup being employed.

But yes, using the Rewrite Link option will allow you to index from one server, and create a set of index files which point to a different server.

Do I need to just edit the zoom_pagedata.zdat file and do a "replace all" on the URL?

No. You should never attempt to modify the zoom_pagedata.zdat file. This is why it says this at the top of the file:

## WARNING: DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE.

Those capital letters mean it's important We're not kidding.

Do I need to spider twice on the production server? 1 normally and 1 with rewrite links (with the backup URL in).

If you need two sets of index files, one to run on a production server, and one to run on a backup server. But the question is whether you really need this.

As an afterthought, depending on the location of the files within the site, you could potentially use the Rewrite Links option to change the URLs to relative addresses. This way you could potentially create one set of index files that would work on both sites.

For example, a link from:
http://live.mysite.com/search/search.php

That normally points to:
http://live.mysite.com/hello.html

Can be changed to:
../hello.html

Etc.... this would depend on the folder hierarchy you have organized your files in, and if you are doing cross-domain linking, then this would complicate matters.

[MikeR]

The reason this came about is I always have two servers running at once, production and backup. When the production server is up I have a redirect on the backup server to the production server. If for some reason I need to take the production server down I remove the redirect so they can access the production server. These are static websites only so there is no out of sync issues between the server.

Now the real need for this is my backup server hardware is not on par with the production server and could never handle doing an index of itself. So I wanted to copy the zoom files from production to backup and rewrite the links on the backup server.

However it is looking like I need to index twice once without rewrite link and once with rewrite links...is that correct?

Thanks

[Ray]

The reason this came about is I always have two servers running at once, production and backup. When the production server is up I have a redirect on the backup server to the production server. If for some reason I need to take the production server down I remove the redirect so they can access the production server. These are static websites only so there is no out of sync issues between the server.

OK. So I presume this is a URL redirect, as opposed to a DNS redirect.

However it is looking like I need to index twice once without rewrite link and once with rewrite links...is that correct?

Not necessarily, see the comments at the bottom of my previous post regarding using rewrite links with relative addresses.

[MikeR]

OK. So I presume this is a URL redirect, as opposed to a DNS redirect.



Not necessarily, see the comments at the bottom of my previous post regarding using rewrite links with relative addresses.

Yes URL redirect. I think I get what you mean...I will try this out. Thanks for the help.