Friday, January 28, 2005 Good morning!
Am doing some research on what's required for setting up a web server for handling multiple sites, and would like to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. This is where you have www.site1.com and www.site2.com pointing to the same computer. As per the excellent manual of A4D, in the section of Virtual Hosting (p. 47), > However, if your host machine supports TCP/IP > multihoming, you can easily set up completely different web sites on the same > machine and configure Active4D to route requests to the correct folder. With multihoming, I believe you have separate IP addresses assigned to each domain name, and these all point to the same computer: www.site1.com = 192.168.1.7 www.site2.com = 192.168.1.8 All fairly clear, and seems very straightforward how to configure all this in the VirtualHosts.ini file. Now, the request from IT is that they'd like to use host-headers for the multiple sites, not multihoming, as IP addresses are scarce. My understanding of this is that host headers uses the *same* IP address for different domain names, ie: www.site1.com = 192.168.1.7 www.site2.com = 192.168.1.7 and that the resolving of this for the web browser happens with the DNS servers (ie, the user enters either domain name in the web browser, and either of them are resolved by the DNS server and come rolling into the same web server). Now my questions (please correct any incorrect or incomplete comments above!): 1) Do I simply configure the VirtualHosts.ini file exactly the same as indicated in the instructions? (I would guess yes, but I'm not totally clear on this.) 2) What happens if someone enters "http://192.168.1.7/innercontents/innerfile.html";, and that path happens to be valid in two different sites? (ie, http://www.site1.com/innercontents/innerfile.html and http://www.site2.com/innercontents/innerfile.html both exist). How does Active4D resolve this? Would the way to avoid this problem be to force the user to use a host name in their request, and set up an entry in the VirtualHosts.ini for the IP address in the Host Name column to direct this request appropriately (ie, some page that says "please use the site name in your url?")? 3) What about SSL? Reading up on host headers and the IIS server, it appears this doesn't work (see http://support.microsoft.com/?id=187504). I would think the same problem applies to 4D/Active4D? 4) Also, isn't the SSL certificate tied to a specific domain (ie, "www.site1.com")? So how does it work even in a multihoming situation? Isn't there just one certificate for the web server? (Or once you have the SSL certificate set up, it doesn't matter what the incoming domain is?) The system planned for this will be 4D 2003, with the web server on the Client, and Active4D. Many thanks for your help! Just tryin' to wrap my head around this... Michael Larue _______________________________________________ Active4D-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/mailman/listinfo/active4d-dev Archives: http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/archive/active4d-dev/
