Post Aegir installation - Hosting Servers Page Concerns (2 Servers, not 1)

There may not be an issue here, but my intuition tells me that it could be later on.

While watching a Drupal Friendly screencast produced by Natalie, I noticed that her ~/hosting/servers page looked quite different from mine.

You can view her Severs page here. http://friendlydrupal.com/screencasts/install-platforms-and-sites-aegir-...

My Servers page is attached below. Natalie only listed one server, which I believe was localhost.

My Servers page lists two servers. 1) My FQDN (liebens), and 2) localhost.

What looks odd to me is that my FQDN is only associated with the Apache web server, and the localhost is only associated with mysql. I am thinking that if I later wanted to migrate this hostmaster site to another server, then I may have a problem with the mysql database.

Per the Aegir installation instructions, I created another MySQL root account for Aegir using the following MySQL command like:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON . TO 'aegir_root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

ergonlogic confirms that '%' is a wildcard. It appears that the wildcard defaults to localhost in this case.

egonlogic also wonders if there might be an issue with sockets down the road.

Am I going to run into any possible problems? Should I just reinstall Aegir using the FQDN (the value returned by 'hostname -f') instead of '%'?

Any guidance or comments would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

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#1

From the ensuing IRC discussion in #aegir.

01:31 ergonlogic@> feldmand: but aside frm that, it's normal to have 2 servers
01:31 ergonlogic@> it simplifies installation
01:32 ergonlogic@> there's really just the one real server, but Aegir is treating it as two, one running the web server and the other the db server
01:32   feldmand > ergonlogic: good to know. :)  I will see if I can caputre the view from Friendly Drupal's video and add that as well.
01:32 ergonlogic@> I don't recall what the reason was
01:32 ergonlogic@> and I think we could work around it now
01:33   feldmand > ergonlogic: I realize that currently that this will not be an issue, but couldn't this possibly be an issue in a multiple server 
                   scenario?
01:34 ergonlogic@> how?
01:34 >> OpenURL 3
01:34    hefring > community => Post Aegir installation - Hosting Servers Page Concerns (2 Servers, not 1) => 
                   http://community.aegirproject.org/discuss/post-aegir-installation-hostin...
01:35   feldmand > ergonlogic: Let's say that I wished to migrate the hostmaster itself including DB to a new server. If the DB is currently 
                   associated with the localhost and not the FQDN might I lose the DB during the migration?
01:36 ergonlogic@> you can't migrate the hostmaster site across servers
01:36 ergonlogic@> at least not yet
01:36   feldmand > There is hefring again. :) She is very attentive.
01:36 ergonlogic@> remote servers don't normally have provision installed
01:36 ergonlogic@> again, yet
01:37 ergonlogic@> also, the hostmaster site is barred from any such operations in the front-end
01:37   feldmand > :) So if Aegir can manage sites on other servers, where do the DB for the other servers reside?
01:39 ergonlogic@> either on other mysql servers, or you open your local mysql server to remote connections
01:40   feldmand > ergonlogic: I thought about opening the local mysql server to remote connections, but that seems somehow inefficient if the servers 
                   are separated on opposite end of the earth.
01:41 ergonlogic@> right
01:41   feldmand > ergonlogic: I suppose other mysql servers seems like a better solution, but I cannot imagine the architecture just yet. Still a 
                   newbie.
01:42   feldmand > ergonlogic: In the 'other mysql servers" scenario, the 'master' Aegir database would hold all backups for all servers globally?
01:43 ergonlogic@> Well, while Aegir supports remote servers, the general use-case is for a cluster of local servers
01:43 ergonlogic@> otherwise there are a number of performance issues, but mostly with sync'ing files around 
01:43   feldmand > ergonlogic: good to know.  Nice to know the inherent limitations of a system.
01:44 ergonlogic@> you can have remote servers, but you'll generally want the db server that'll be serving those sites to be fairly proximate
01:45 ergonlogic@> but it's currently a hub & spoke network model, so everything happens locally, and then gets sync'ed back and forth
01:46 ergonlogic@> backups aren't just a db dump, they also tar up the site's directory
01:46   feldmand > ergonlogic: Proximate to the db server, whether the hostmaster DB or other DB's, right?
01:47 ergonlogic@> well, this isn't a limitation of Aegir's, mind you
01:47 ergonlogic@> it's just network latency
01:47   feldmand > ergonlogic: Naturally. :) a geographic latency.
01:47 ergonlogic@> right
01:48 ergonlogic@> the plan is to make the remote servers smarter though
01:48   feldmand > ergonlogic: Interesting.
01:50 ergonlogic@> there's an issue about it, iirc