thanos panousis's questions

I am trying to install CPanel on a Centos VM on windows azure. Yum is failing to install gcc, which is required by the cpanel installer.

I am getting this

Error: Package: glibc-2.12-1.80.el6.i686 (base)
2013-02-22 13:08:24  709 (DEBUG):                Requires: glibc-common = 2.12-1.80.el6
2013-02-22 13:08:24  709 (DEBUG):                Installed: glibc-common-2.12-1.80.el6_3.6.x86_64 (@updates)
2013-02-22 13:08:24  709 (DEBUG):                    glibc-common = 2.12-1.80.el6_3.6
2013-02-22 13:08:24  709 (DEBUG):                Available: glibc-common-2.12-1.80.el6.x86_64 (base)
2013-02-22 13:08:24  709 (DEBUG):                    glibc-common = 2.12-1.80.el6

I think the main issues stems from the fact that I had to comment out my updates repository because it was constantly giving errors.

Centos 6.3 azure update repo

#released updates
[updates]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Updates
baseurl=http://olcentgbl.trafficmanager.net/centos/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6

Gives the following constant errors

# sudo yum update all
Loaded plugins: security
base      | 3.7 kB     00:00
extras    | 3.5 kB     00:00
openlogic | 1.3 kB     00:00
updates   | 3.5 kB     00:00
http://olcentgbl.trafficmanager.net/centos/6/updates/x86_64/repodata/41734c6392fbfa51abb5fb73887b5167c0780eeb485b236bc0eccfd1fc3d6245-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 22 - "The requested URL returned error: 404"
Trying other mirror.
http://olcentgbl.trafficmanager.net/centos/6/updates/x86_64/repodata/41734c6392fbfa51abb5fb73887b5167c0780eeb485b236bc0eccfd1fc3d6245-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 22 - "The requested URL returned error: 404"
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: repodata/41734c6392fbfa51abb5fb73887b5167c0780eeb485b236bc0eccfd1fc3d6245-primary.sqlite.bz2 from updates: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
[indice@indice-centos2 ~]$ sudo yum update
Loaded plugins: security
http://olcentgbl.trafficmanager.net/centos/6/updates/x86_64/repodata/41734c6392fbfa51abb5fb73887b5167c0780eeb485b236bc0eccfd1fc3d6245-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] PYCURL ERROR 22 - "The requested URL returned error: 404"
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: repodata/41734c6392fbfa51abb5fb73887b5167c0780eeb485b236bc0eccfd1fc3d6245-primary.sqlite.bz2 from updates: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Could you please post some advice?

Our PHP application consists of a single web server that will receive files from clients and perform a CPU-intensive analysis on them. Right now, analysis of a single user upload can take 3sec to conclude and take 100% CPU. This makes our system capacity amount to 1/3 requests per second.

My team's requirement is to increase capacity without a lot of code reengineering. A possible solution would be to set up a load balancer in front of multiple servers running the same app, connecting to a common DB. The problem is that the analysis outputs files on disk.

A load balancer would increase capacity, but then files won't be available between servers so consequent client requests may fail. We are hosted on Rackspace, is there a way to configure some sort of "common" storage for all servers, without having to rewrite our file persistance code? Current code relies on simple fopens etc. What are our options?