[Gloucs] apache virtual hosts

[Guy Edwards]

On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 17:30, Richard Mellersh wrote:
> Thanks for the reply, it's not yet sorted, in fact it's worse.

I'm not entirely sure what you're up to but the following might help a
bit, I've got Debian here so I don't have a vhosts.conf...

> I suppose it is "mucking around" but I REALLY want it to work from outside but 
> without DNS yet (I don't know how or how much it is to do DNS).  What I 
> thought would work is if I give friends/ colleagues etc an address such as 
> http://195.112.17.79/site1 or http://195.112.17.79/site2 I could somehow use 
> apache to redirect these requests to various directories.

[disclaimer: Guy is not an Apache admin (yet)]

Out of the following I think the first idea is the one you're after,
treat the rest as just helpful info.

Note: you still need to modify the DNS with this so that peoples
machines actually know that fredbloggs.myserversomewhere.co.uk
translates to a certain IP, otherwise they won't be able to find you. 

You can redirect queries using Apache and redirect to another
destination/server/folder... easier if I show you ... yours might look
something like:

[...]
NameVirtualHost your.ip.address.here
 <VirtualHost your.ip.address.here>
 Servername myserversomewhere.co.uk
 </VirtualHost>
 
 <VirtualHost your.ip.address.here>
 Servername fredbloggs.myserversomewhere.co.uk
 ServerAlias *
 Redirect permanent / http://mybigserversomewhere.co.uk/fredbloggssite/
 </VirtualHost>
[...]

so requests to fredbloggs.myserversomewhere.co.uk would redirect to 
http://myserversomewhere.co.uk/fredbloggssite/


Other not as good ideas that might help you one day:

You can have different sites running of different ports (80,81,82,83
etc) if a client connects to port 80, send them to one folder, if they
connect to 81 another....
url would appear like http://server.somewhere.some.dom:82/
have a look at some of the other cool ways (quick google) you can
redirect here:
http://quark.humbug.org.au/publications/apache/apache-redirect.html
like sending people to different machines based on what folder they
access etc.

No DNS changing access? Well you could use symlinks which I've guess
you've tried but I think isn't exactly what you're asking for. If you
really trust people not to be bad you can turn on symlinks per directory
in Apache if you wish with (showing a big section so you get an idea of
usage):
[...]
<VirtualHost localhost>
        ServerName localhost
        ServerAdmin webmaster at localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/friends
        <Directory /var/www/friends>
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>

Although it's safer to do the following:
	Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch 

and then of course just make a link in the normal way
mymachine:/var/www/friends# ln -s /home/bob/www bobsdir

If you can persuade work to buy you a book, check out "Apache the
Definitive Guide", O'Reilly, Chapter3 or so relates to all this. 

There's a fair number webhosting people on the list who will hopefully
point out if I've completely got the wrong solutions here or made some
error.

Guy