SniperSpy Upgrade

We ran out of 600GB of space we had at our current server, and the database was hosting text about 5GB. The proud upgrade of server we did in May, 2009 was no longer enough.

The trouble was, we didn't want to torture our customers, among thousands, by asking them to upgrade their builds with new version. We wanted everything to work behind the scene, and yet utilize the new server, 2TB of drive space, and new database.

We did it!

Our server runs on Linux and web scripts are running in PHP. PHP comes with some powerful network programming capabilities, here are two that helped.

1. PHP FTP Functions

One can create a fully functional secure FTP client in PHP. This helps in making the scripts transfer logs to new server, while the requests come to old server.

2. PHP Socket/HTTP Functions

PHP supports writing socket programs, but what helped in our case was the HTTP functions. This helps in sending request to another web server, and taking their response to the scripts only. We can do both GET/POST requests thru it.

This helps in writing several web programs that communicates between old and new server. Like isNewFilesPresent.php returns if new files is ready for fetching, and display it on the welcome page.

Besides that, MySQL can be given remote access permission, hence a web program can make use of database hosted on another server.

So, everything happily worked out.

Get more information about SniperSpy Remote Spy Software here.