[plug] Virtual Servers and DNS entries

[Richard Mortimer]

> > After a long battle to get virtual servers running under apache, I
finally
> > managed to get them working,
>
> Sad to hear it was problematic.

Yes, in fairness to Apache - the 'long battle' was broken over a few months,
but probably in 1/2 hour blocks per month.

The secret to (named) Virtual Servers that I have found is that you need to
bind them to a specific address (local IP), and a specific port (80, by
default). Asking them to listen to any incoming traffic on port 80 won't
suffice.

After trying to manipulate the httpd.conf by hand, I downloaded a copy of
Webmin - saw what changes it made, and was able to replicate this to other
virtual servers. Basically:

WRONG:
<VirtualHost bugs.netfire.com.au>
 # details
</VirtualHost>

RIGHT:
<VirtualHost 192.168.0.22:80>
 ServerName bugs.netfire.com.au
        # details
</VirtualHost>

I guess the "gotchya" for young players is that the VirtualHost tag is the
same for every virtualhost, whereas I expected the definition of the
VirtualHost to contain the information about the relevant server, rather
than that information being a level down.

Hope someone else can learn from my experiences!!

And thanks for the prompt reply.

Richard


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Devenish" <devenish at guild.uwa.edu.au>
To: <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 10:08 AM
Subject: Re: [plug] Virtual Servers and DNS entries


> In message <008801c3773e$ee336850$b000a8c0 at richard>
> on Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 09:57:40AM +0800, Richard Mortimer wrote:
> > After a long battle to get virtual servers running under apache, I
finally
> > managed to get them working,
>
> Sad to hear it was problematic.
>
> > into several smaller domains for specific jobs (ie, use
> > http://www.netfire.com.au for the main domain http://bugs.netfire.com.au
for
> > the bug tracking software, http://help.netfire.com.au for the
application's
> > help pages, etc).
>
> Sure.
>
> > Whilst this is working fine from within our firewall, I tried to access
a
> > couple of virtual servers from home last night and got a "Server not
found"
> > error - am I correct in having a guess that our upstream ISP have
provided a
> > DNS entry similar to (apologies for my rough mapping outline):
> >
> >     www.netfire.com.au => 203.15.140.159
> >     netfire.com.au => 203.15.140.159
>
> Yes (though technically www.netfire.com.au uses netfire.com.au as its
canonical
> name (CNAME) rather than specifying the IP address directly).
>
> > and there *should* be an entry that says something like:
> >
> >     *.netfire.com.au => 203.15.140.159
> >
> > Is that correct, or does there need to be a DNS entry at the upstream
> > provider for every virtual domain?
>
> The latter is normal. It *is* possible to do the former, but it is unusual
and
> you will have to ask your ISP what their arrangements are.
>
> > Is this something that I can ask our ISP to provide to allow me to
control
> > sub-domains from our server?
>
> You will have to ask Arachnet themselves. I note from
> <http://www.arach.net.au/products/domain_hosting/dns/index.shtml>:
>
>     "There is no additional charge on the number of entries in the zone
file or
>     the number of times you are permitted to make changes to your
listing."
>