[lug] virtual domains

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 03:43:06PM -0600, PC Drew wrote:
> There's two schools of thought with virtual domains: hardware and
> software.  With Netscape Enterprise Server, the best way to handle
> virtual domains is to have a seperate IP address for each virtual
> server.  This would mean that, in your case, 1 server would have 3 or
> 4 IP addresses.  Then, in the DNS, you'd point the domain to its
> respective IP address.

Heck, i have some 60 domains on some of my servers ... i wish 
i had _that_ many IP addresses.

> The other school of thought, software virtual servers, is what most
> people do with Apache.  With Apache, you'd setup your DNS to all point
> to the same IP address and then Apache will figure out that you've
> typed in www.yourdomain.com instead of www.yourotherdomain.com and
> distinguish the two based on your configuration file.

One thing i forgot to mention in my previous post:
HTTP 1.0 doesn't support virtual hosts. So if you have to
serve a lot of older (read: totaly out-of-date) browsers you
might need separate IP addresses. Background: an HTTP 1.0 browser
sends the following request string:

 GET /index.html HTTP/1.0

There's nothing in here from which the server can detect the
name of the server that is suposed to answer. A newer browser
will send (at least):

 Get /index.html HTTP/1.1
 host: www.coolstuff.org

So, to be helpfull to users of older browsers make sure that
you 'default' server sends some usefull page to older clients
(on important sites i tend to add redirected subdirectories to
the default server so that for each www.virtual.com there is
a http://default.com/www.virtual.com/ with the same content.
This also means that links within the site need to be realtive).

 Ralf
> Here's Apache's documentation on the matter:
> http://www.apache.org/docs/vhosts/index.html
> 
> Oh, and you're definitely not the only one who's trying to do this!!
> 
> 
> 
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