[GLLUG] Apache virtual servers

[Clay Dowling]

Seth Bembeneck wrote:
> I have had virtual servers running fine for a while now, but lately I 
> have been experiencing some problems.
> 
> For example:
> 
> The url’s http://cwhq.net <http://cwhq.net/> and www.cwhq.net 
> <http://www.cwhq.net/> don’t seem to work in IE. But when used in 
> Mozilla Firefox, they work fine.
> 
> I have on the cwhq.net server, a re-direction service. It takes long 
> urls (http://blah.com/userblah/blah/m.html) and allows you to instead to 
> userblah.cwhq.net
> 
> An example of one of these is god.cwhq.net, which works, even though it 
> goes to the same place as http://cwhq.net <http://cwhq.net/> and 
> www.cwhq.net <http://www.cwhq.net/>
> 
> What is going on?

What's going on is that your DNS records are broken.  You have no A 
record for cwhq.net, only www.cwhq.net.  You have a redirect for 
www.cwhq.net that sends the following header:

Location: http://cwhq.net/home.php

The miracle is that you got any browser at all to see your site.  If the 
folks at Mozilla hadn't taken precautions to assume that a lot of people 
would engage in this sort of broken behavior, you wouldn't be seeing 
anything.

Set up your DNS records properly, and consider leaving the redirect 
alone, or setting it up to better match your reality.

As for dynamic virtual servers, I think you should hold off until you 
can figure out this problem a little better.  Last time I used the 
dynamic servers, some pretty interesting curve balls were thrown my way 
(SERVER_ROOT returns interesting, not to say useful, values).

Clay Dowling
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