On 14 Apr 2006 at 8:52, Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 03:36:07AM -0400, sberaud wrote:
> > I think,
> >
> > At least I now have NamedVirtualHosts in Apache working correctly. I
> > needed the server alias directive to be set for each new virtual domain
> > - don't I feel silly.
>
> Assuming you mean the ServerAlias directive... yeah, it's important that
> you cover every single name that users might use to contact your virtual
> host. Typically that means "www.domain.com" and "domain.com". Just
> using "domain.com" isn't enough to cover "www.domain.com".
Browse to langille.org. You get redirected to www.langille.org.
Why? Because I want it that way. I used to allow both. Now I allow
only the www. I could just have a ServerAlias. But I don't. I do
this:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin dan [ at ] example [ dot ] org
ServerName langille.org
Redirect permanent / http://www.langille.org/
ErrorLog /usr/websites/log/langille.org-error.log
CustomLog /usr/websites/log/langille.org-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
It allows the user to enter the short form and still get to where I
want them.
If I allowed both, robots would be taking twice as bandwidth as
necessary. They'd be downloading both langille.org and
www.langille.org. It also means that web proxies/caches would be
caching additional pages they don't need to cache. This isn't an
issue for langille.org, but it is an issue for freshports.org which
has about 370,000 pages.
> To avoid the confusion of getting the wrong host, I set up my servers
> so that using the IP (or the hostname, e.g. "hostname.mydomain.com")
> gets you a "default" site (/var/www/default). This is like the host's
> "personal" webspace, where we can put miscellaneous things for people
> to download, server status pages, etc.
Same here. As an exercise, browse to http://www.langille.org/, then
compare that with what you see when you browse to the IP address of
www.langille.org.
> Accessing just plain "http://hostname.mydomain.com"; is an index of
> these things from inside my network, or a 403 "forbidden" error from
> outside. This means it's abundantly clear if a domain is set up
> incorrectly -- I get a directory index rather than getting another
> "real" virtual site.
I set up the default website for the same reason.