It's often not desirable to expose your Drupal server directly to the end users. This document describes how to “hide” a Drupal server behind a reverse proxy server. This is typically done for a number of reasons:

• protection: the topology of the server, the database server can be hidden from the front end

• caching: The proxy server take away load from the backend system through caching

• flexibility: the topology behind the reverse proxy can be changed more easily

• scalability: the proxy server can be used for future load balancing

The technical problem isn't new. It has been solved before. I had however problems finding a solution in a single document.

The configuration is basically a platform neutral AMP stack …

After reading Fernando Ipar’s interesting post on partial indexes for string columns, there were two things I wanted to note:

First, this trick works quite well, but only if your like clauses only ever use the wildcard on the right hand side (or not at all). MySQL will not be able to use the index if the like contains a wildcard on the left.

Consider the following table definition:

mysql> show create table people\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: people
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `people` (
`person_id` int(15) NOT NULL default '0',
`username` varchar(255) default NULL,
`email` varchar(255) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`person_id`),
KEY `people_username` (`username`(5))
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row …