Pass Through File Without Pulling File to Server - Possible?

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1

Hi all,

I have a question I’m fairly certain I already know the answer to, but just in case there are some really smart people that know something I don’t, I figured I’d ask.

Say I have a scenario where I have three servers, A, B, and C. A requests a file from B. B is actually just kind of middle man, does some processing, and figures out where the file is on server C.

WITHOUT doing a redirect, is there any way to pass along that file from C to A without having to first pull it to B and push from there to A?

I can’t think how this would be possible (without a redirect), but I figured I’d ask anyways just in case there was some magic trick I didn’t know. :wink:

2

What is the processing? You might be able to handle it with a reverse proxy depending on what happens there.

3

It actually varies.

Some of it is loading and processing pages (compiling scripts, etc). Some of it is just straight image patch through (images are on server C and I want server B to let server A know without server A knowing about server C).

4

If I wanted to do just the image portion like that, is there anything I could get it to do what I want. That’s actually the big one I want to do.

5

Images would be pretty easy with a reverse proxy. Personally, I’d use nginx if I had to pick but most modern web server stacks can do it.* It still will be pulling the file through it, but with most reverse proxies you can setup some pretty aggressive caching so a very small percentage of requests really make the round trip.

  • Note there is a big security bug with Apache’s reverse proxy module as of today.
6

Thanks, I’ll look into that.

We’d likely use Nginx too since we’ve started rolling out most of our boxes with nginx on them (so much faster than Apache =p).

7

I’ve got a fond spot for nginx myself. Not only is it real, real fast, the config file is not an insane hodgepodge of different grammars.