Virtual Hosting Questions

[Bill Winspur <bw...@wynnon.com>]

I need to set up a few virtual hosts for a development project, and 
being new to Tomcat virtual hosts, have a couple of questions:
-------------------
1. In development, the clients and tomcat will be on an intranet. I plan 
to use the hosts files of the client and tomcat boxes to map domain 
names to IP addresses, thereby preempting invocation of DNS, and thus 
exposure of our product-specific domain names to the Internet at-large, 
until the site is deployed publicly.

Question 1: Is this hosts-file approach feasible? Does tomcat care HOW 
domain names
are mapped to IP addresses?
------------------
The following fragment is extracted from conf/server.xml of the the 
tomcat distribution:

<Host name="localhost" debug="0" appBase="webapps"
          unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
          xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
    <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"
              directory="logs"  prefix="localhost_log." suffix=".txt"
              timestamp="true"/>
</Host>

Question 2: Why is the host named localhost? From the documentation, I 
expected that only URL's of the form http://localhost:8080/... would be 
handled by this virtual host, but it seems to handle any URL's that map 
to the IP and port of the real host that tomcat serves.
-------------------
Question 3: How would one configure a 'local' virtual host, i.e. a host 
visible only on the box that runs tomcat?
-------------------
Thanks,
Bill


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Re: Virtual Hosting Questions

[Justin Jaynes <ju...@yahoo.com>]

Bill,

I believe I know what you are trying to do.  I have
done the a smiliar thing.  Let me answer your
questions one at a time.

> I need to set up a few virtual hosts for a
> development project, and 
> being new to Tomcat virtual hosts, have a couple of
> questions:

By virtual hosts, I assume you mean multiple domains
all hosted on the same box, like www.firstsite.com,
www.secondsite.com, etc with all different pages being
displayed at each site, with one tomcat server
running.

To do this, you have to get your server.xml
configuration just right, as well as have your hosts
files setup (or DNS entries).  Right now, on my
server, I have four virtual hosts.  I have 4 different
DNS entries all pointing to the same IP.  The
configuration in server.xml makes tomcat point each
address to a different directory with my web content
for each site.

> 1. In development, the clients and tomcat will be on
> an intranet. I plan 
> to use the hosts files of the client and tomcat
> boxes to map domain 
> names to IP addresses, thereby preempting invocation
> of DNS, and thus 
> exposure of our product-specific domain names to the
> Internet at-large, 
> until the site is deployed publicly.
> 

Therefore, without DNS entries, you must put an entry
for each desired virtual host into the hosts file on
each client you wish to have pointing to the server,
with the ip address.

> Question 1: Is this hosts-file approach feasible?

Yes.  Quite feasible.

> Does tomcat care HOW 
> domain names
> are mapped to IP addresses?

Not that I know of.  But I am no expert.

> The following fragment is extracted from
> conf/server.xml of the the 
> tomcat distribution:
> 
> <Host name="localhost" debug="0" appBase="webapps"
>           unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
>           xmlValidation="false"
> xmlNamespaceAware="false">
>     <Logger
> className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"
>               directory="logs" 
> prefix="localhost_log." suffix=".txt"
>               timestamp="true"/>
> </Host>
> 

To get each virtual host to direct to its own page,
you must have one whole host entry for each virtual
host where localhost is replaced by the domain that
you desire (e.g. www.firstdomain.com).  Then, within
the host entry, create a context to point to the
proper directory structure.

> Question 2: Why is the host named localhost?

Just a convention of UNIX machines.  You pick any
other name you want for mapping to ip's that you put
in your hosts file or a DNS entry (assuming it is
registered to you).

> I 
> expected that only URL's of the form
> http://localhost:8080/... would be 
> handled by this virtual host, but it seems to handle
> any URL's that map 
> to the IP and port of the real host that tomcat
> serves.

By default (i believe) any name that does not have a
corresponding Host entry in the server.xml file is
routed to the first entry (or something like that) so
your virtual hosts won't split to different pages
until you create a host entry for each one.

> -------------------
> Question 3: How would one configure a 'local'
> virtual host, i.e. a host 
> visible only on the box that runs tomcat?
> -------------------

Just put the entry for the desired domain in the hosts
file of only the local machine (the server) and not in
the hosts files on the other machines on the network.

It's that easy.  If I can give any other pointers,
just ask another question.

Good luck,

Justin Jaynes


		
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