From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Feb 6 11:34:16 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id LAA04367 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 6 Feb 1996 11:34:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from pelican.com (pelican.com [206.16.90.21]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA04352 for ; Tue, 6 Feb 1996 11:33:58 -0800 (PST) Received: by pelican.com (Smail3.1.29.1 #10) id m0tjt9B-0000SMC; Tue, 6 Feb 96 11:33 PST Message-Id: Date: Tue, 6 Feb 96 11:33 PST From: pete@pelican.com (Pete Carah) To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: apache server In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk In article marc writes: >On Mon, 5 Feb 1996, bill clarke wrote: >> dear BSD >> i am up and running FBSD 2.1 and running one web site on the apache >> server. >> i want to add some more web sites(with their own domain names). do i >> need to acquire a unique ip address for each URL, or is there a way to >> host multiple sites on my server with only my single assigned ip? > I've been following comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix for the >past while, and this question keeps coming up. Apache requires a >unique IP for each virtual server that you have running. Someone brought >up something about one of the commercial OSs/Servers being able to do >this, but I don't recall which it was (AIX maybe? *shrug*) Nobody >confirmed or denied it though If you want to have each site show as http://unique.site.name/xxxxx, this problem is NOT solvable by anything on the server end except for multiple IP addresses. The problem comes from a shortcoming in the http protocol itself; the base site name is not forwarded to the host when the http query is made. This is because the CERN/UIUC folks way back a few years ago, when they invented http thought that noone would ever want to do that, I guess... Again, nothing you can do on the server end will help except for multiple IP addresses!!! (well, you can kluge it like a lot of providers do with http://provider.name/~site but it sounds like you don't want to do that; another way involves CNAMEs and a chooser page but that's a kluge too). Fixing this would require EVERY BROWSER IN THE WORLD to be fixed; there is room in the http protocol for that request (proxies use it) but the default is to not do it... A revision to the http protocol would have to be backward compatible for a few years, anyhow, so the fix would be long in coming. Multiple IP addrs aren't really a big problem if you're a provider. They would be if you pay for each one, or aren't on a routed subnet. I have a freebsd apache server with 19 aliases on it now; it still works just fine, though our request rate is still fairly low (about 100/hr total files on average over January; most requests were for two of the (sub)-sites. Samples -- www.ci.diamond-bar.ca.us, www.turkeyrack.com (really :-), www.macom-phi.com, and several others. These are on a P120 with 64mb of ram and "lots" of disk, primarily running inn and httpd; also serving as a primary or secondary name server for a bunch of domains.. Just on general principles, we are planning to split the web and news services; a P120 can easily keep up with a T1 doing all of this so we don't really need to split them up (but it takes *lots* of ram to keep the response times reasonable, especially if you want to run X on the console too). -- Pete