[Xitami] Redirecting an URL to another port

[Joe Byrne]

Ewen,
   Two IPs ... Two NICs ... dauh sometimes its way to easy to overlook the
obvious.  All of my servers have multiple NICs (I know I could bind multiple
IPs to one, but as long as they're there) and seeing as I have a few class
C's handy, viola!  Works like a charm.  Thanks!

-----Original Message-----
From: xitami-admin@lists.xitami.org
[mailto:xitami-admin@lists.xitami.org]On Behalf Of Ewen McNeill
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 8:38 PM
To: xitami@lists.xitami.org
Subject: Re: [Xitami] Redirecting an URL to another port


In message <FNEAKJNHKIFEIAHOLMPCOEEPCDAA.Joe@ByrneWorld.com>, "Joe Byrne"
writes:
>   I don't know if this is Becky's reason or not, but I too have tried to
do
>this.  I have a web based email application (rather popular one by Windows
>standards) that runs on port 3001.  My clients get their mail bu going to:
>http://mail.domainname.com:3001.  Great, but most of my customer don't
>understand ports and I end up fielding a lot of calls because they get my
>home page instead of their email.  I've ended up running the email and web
>servers on two different machines to avoid the port problem, but I also
have
>a calendar application that runs (by default) on port 8060.  I really don't
>want to license 3 copies of Windows (almost the cost of the hardware!) just
>to make the lives of my customers easy, but I don't have a lot of choice.

You don't need three copies of Windows.  You need 1 copy of NT Server
or 2000 (assuming that you _have_ to use Windows due to the software you
need; any modern Unix/Linux system can do this just as easily).  Then you
bind three IP addresses to the _same_ server (NT Server and 2000 can do
this; 95/98/ME, etc cannot).  Then you configure Xitami, and whatever
other programs that you want to listen on _one_ of those IP addresses
(each).  (Xitami can be configured to do this with the [server] ipaddress
setting; by default it is "*" which means "everything you can find".)

If you have only one IP address to play with (and it sounds like you
don't, if setting three machines up is a feasible option), then you need
to look at doing some sort of selective request forwarding -- ie, having
a program that handles the request, connects to the "real thing", and
then passes back the reply it gets.  With Xitami something like LRWP
would be required for this, or if you're lucky with the URLs used a
filter or CGI script.  (Filters are basically CGI, but run with the
input being the original page before filtering -- you can ignore that
and make it all up yourself if you want.)

If you don't care about all your users that are behind corporate
firewalls being blocked from accessing it, you can run your other
servers on off-numbered ports, and send redirects.  If you need to do
this only for a few basic URLs a CGI or filter would be sufficient for
this; just have it return a Location: header with the new location.
(But any user behind a corporate firewall that says port-80-outside
only, will get redirected, but otherwise not be able to access the
service.)

As I commented in my earlier message this is not a solution to the
codered type problem, as you'll just end up causing more work for your
system not less.  Only by having another machine in front (eg, a
transparent proxy or a reverse proxy) that can do that filtering off do
you save anything.

Ewen

--
Ewen McNeill, Technical Consultant, iMatix Corporation  www.imatix.com

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