Virtual Domains

[Michael Douglass <mi...@texas.net>]

As I am new to the list, this could already have been covered... But I was
wondering, (and I could be so wrong in this that you will all hate me
forever!) why when doing Virtual IPs you can't bind to the actual IPs of
the virtual domains individually.  In other words, whenever I've setup
an apache server with virtual domains, I always remember using * as the
bind to address.

My question/suggestion is to allow each virtual domain to specify a bind-to
address that is thrown into a select() call when waiting for connections
instead of binding to all ips on the system.

Reasoning?  Damn, everything has to have a reason eh?  Well, there is a good
reason.  When a particular server get's overloaded, it's nice to be able
to break up the responsibility to multiple servers.  Actually, the only time
I ran into this "problem" was when either NCSA or one of the early Apache's
wouldn't let me specify more than 10 virtual domains at a time. (I could
find no hard-coded limit, so it seemed a bit obscure...)  And I could not
run another web server with multiple domains because the first one would
bind to * and that would be all she wrote.

So the reasons might be weak, but the idea/concept (IMHO) is a good one.
That way you can regulate which ips get listened on, etc.

Michael Douglass
Texas Networking, Inc.


  "To be a saint is to be an exception; to be a true man is the rule.
   Err, fail, sin if you must, but be upright.  To sin as little as
   possible is the law for men; to sin not at all is a dream for angels."

              - Victor Hugo, "Les Miserables"