Help needed with Apache Service Host Header using a DNS Alias

[Void8Reaper]

Hi All

I am pretty new to the whole ERS 4.0 and apache/tomcat services so hopefully I can explain what I am trying to do and get some guidance on how to do it.

Currently we have the ERS 4.0 running apache and tomcat services on our application servers we connect to the application via a url, example

http://servername/location/login.htm

this works fine but we don't want to show the users the background server name so we have had a DNS alias created, example application.ent.com

I can ping the DNS alias but at this time it will not connect to the web app?

I beleive there are some additions to the httpd.conf file that I need to make, specifically to the host header, however scanning the internet for a solution has left me more confused than before with NameVirtualHost, VirtualHost etc

If someone can offer me some guidance in what I need to do for the DNS Alias to be recognised by the server/services I would greatly appreciate it.

If further information of the services we are running are required let me know on this forum and I will submit that information as soon as I can.

Thanks
John

 

[Noway2]

If I understand your post correctly, you want to have a web resource located at //servername/location/login.htm, but don't want servername to be part of the URL?

Depending on your exact implementation and requirements, there are three tools / options that I can think of that would be of value to you.

1) use of vhosts. Using vhosts, it is possible to have the server respond to a different domain name or multiple domain names. Configuring vhosts is pretty straight foward and amounts to enabling the named hosts directive and configuring a virtual host block. The default, sample, http.conf file should have these sections already embedded. If you couple this with a DNS entry to map the name to the correct server, the implementation will appear seamless.

2) use of the alias directive in Apache. If for example, you want to provide a service and it uses script files located outside of the webstack, such as in /usr/lib/testing/example/service you can use the alias directive to provide a simpler url such as //mydomain.com/service.

3) mod_rewrite. The rewrite rule will allow you to modify the url behind the scenes. This is often times used with things like reverse proxies or redirects, but can hide the details from the user.