Excuse the potential noobishness of the question, but I'm, well, a bit of a noob when it comes to this domain architecture lark. If "domain architecture" is even the technical term. Anyway, I digress...
So, I've googled this question , but I can't see the answer I'm looking for (maybe it doesn't exist, who knows!?) The situation is that I host a .com top level domain which does a 301 forward to another site on the net not hosted by me. Can I set up a subdomain that then points somewhere else whether that be on my host itself or just some other site elsewhere on the net?
Essentially, if I set up a subdomain, will it too inherit the web forwarding, and if so, can I directly affect where that subdomain points?
Any answers gratefully appreciated!
Before I try to answer your question, let me be a little fussy :)
First thing first you are confusing and mixing together two different protocols ([DNS] and [HTTP]), actually there is even a dedicated page to the Wikipedia for HTTP 301 responses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301 (but you should read the whole shebang: ([Wikipedia, search for HTTP] is always a good start, and the [RFC 2616] is absolutely a must, IETF RFCs are not easy reading but the Internet is built on them).
DNS is used to translate a name, like www.example.com into an IP address, like 192.168.0.1, in order to locate a machine on the Internet. So DNS is involved as the one of the very first steps a browser takes in order to resolve an URL: but once the "machine name" is translated by the separate DNS Service, and it has become an IP address, DNS job is over and it is used/involved no more.
Then when a browser, using HTTP, contacts the Web Server located on that machine (in this example the machine www.example.com, which the DNS Service has kindly translated to an IP address, in our example 192.168.0.1, because the operating system can only use an IP address as the argument for an [internet socket]) and only at that moment the web server, instead of serving a page, answers whith an "error" code (which, actually is a "response header" with a numeric code that does not start with "2").
Only that this error code is actually used to tell something else: that the browser should try again an "HTTP request", this time connecting to another machine (and, as long as this redirection is "permanent" instead of "temporary" ([HTTP_307]), the new address should be remembered by the browser, its cache and history).
So, if you can setup [redirection response header] on the first machine, it means that there is a Web Server on that first machine that is programmed (given a certain URL pattern) to spit out a Redirection Header, and as long as you can control these redirections, you can as well send the browser wherever you want, not merely sending them to another machine on the Internet but to another URL as well, even on the same website (actually this is the original intended use of code 301, as a measure against [link rot]).
Basically you are free to do whatever you want, or better, to send them wherever you want.
The pros are obvious... the cons are that you must have control over the first web server, and that the visiting browsers will have to perform two "GET request" in order to land at the intended page (this is not grim as it looks, since the [RFC 2616] suggests that the browser (they call it User Agent) caches and remembers the redirection (because it is
permanent)).
Disclaimer: I am being prevented to post hyperlinks, but they where basically all from the Wikipedia so, if you will, you can look the words in brackets "[...]" on the Wikipedia...
Related
this is my first question here, so I will try my best.
I am trying to get the protocol and the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) from a bunch of domains, i.e. get https://es.aliexpress.com from aliexpress.com.
I have tried Selenium webdriver, but it takes too long to compute all the domains (even with short timeouts and blocking images).
I am asking if someone knows a way to do this without loading the content, something like wget but only for the URL.
Thank you for reading.
Not really...
First of all, http and https have nothing to do with domain names. Those are transfer protocols.
Ignoring that part, what you are calling FQDN are often generated at the time you access them.
For instance, many websites redirect the browser from a desktop site to a mobile version (the typical m.something.com) based on your User Agent string. Which mean www.something.com and m.something.com are both valid answers
In the example you gave, aliexpress.com, prepended es. which means there is most likely some code on the server that reads in either your location (based on IP address) or a locale setting in your browser to direct you to the es version of the website as opposed to the en or dk version.
These changes can be done via an .htaccess file in the root folder of the website, or via back end code.
Google Chrome itself automatically tries to add www. if it looks like you typed a URL into the everything bar.
It's also possible that the URL is one giant redirect. Some websites buy up extra domain names that all redirect to their core site. So even if you input xyz.com you'll end up at abcd.com.
There is no algorithmic way to go from a base URL to what you're calling the FQDN.
P.S. Here is an article about what FQDN means.
I want to modify my application URL from //localhost:8080/monitor/index.html to just monitor , so that on putting monitor on browser, my application should open. Is there a way to achieve this, can someone suggest the configuration changes which will be required for this.
Can I map my short URL to the existing one may be somewhere in web.xml. I am not sure about the approach any suggestions will be great.
Thanks and regards
Deb
You're mixing up several different protocol layers in your question.
If you just enter nothing but "monitor" in the browser URL bar the browser is going to first lookup "monitor" in DNS and finding nothing it will then probably send a query to Google or your configured search engine. In the past browsers have taken other steps, such as appending ".com" and prepending "www." but I don't think modern browsers do that any more.
So far, your server is not even remotely involved.
If you're a large ISP user (TimeWarner, Comcast) and use their DNS it's also possible the ISP will intercept your failed DNS lookup and route the request to a "helpful" search page (i.e. SPAM) of their own.
At this point the request is still nowhere near your server.
I suppose you could mess with the /etc/hosts file on your local system to resolve "monitor" to the proper hostname, but that's an extremely brittle solution that has to be hard coded on each machine you want to have this "shortcut" link (and which breaks when the hostname changes).
You're much better off just setting up a web shortcut in your browser that points to the right place.
I am looking for a solution which would redirect the externally facing http://mycompany.com/external/* to be redirected/proxied to http://internal-host:1234/internal/*
(the asterisk is used as a wildcard)
OK, I guess the sentence above is not enough, so here are the details:
In my intranet I have several servers, (names, addresses, ports, and context paths are obviously made-up for the sake of simplicity):
HRServer running at address 10.10.10.10:1010/hr
MailServer running at address 20.20.20.20:2020/mail
My system is accessible from internet only from ip 78.78.78.78, and the constraint here is that I can use only one port (e.g. 8080). In other words - whatever the solution of my problem is - the external address should start with 78.78.78.78:8080
What I need to do is to expose both HR and Mail services though this port.
The first thing which came to my mind was to write two simple portlets (or an HTML with two frames) and to embed them in a simple web page at 78.78.78.78:8080/
But obviously this will not work, as the portlets will redirect the browser to e.g 10.10.10.10:1010/hr which is not visible from the internet.
So my next thought was - OK, lets find a reverse proxy which has dispatching capabilities. Then I can make
78.78.78.78:8080/hr to "redirect" to the internal 10.10.10.10:1010/hr
78.78.78.78:8080/mail to "redirect" to the internal 20.20.20.20:2020/mail
I'd also expect that if let's say the mail server unread messages are seen on 20.20.20.20:2020/mail/unread the unread messages to be also accessible from internet.
Roughly speaking - I'd expect
78.78.78.78:8080/mail/* to redirect to the internal 20.20.20.20:2020/mail/* (the asterisk is used as a wildcard)
I really feel I am missing the obvious here, but honestly - I've spent quite a while in researching several proxies and I did not find the answer. I might be looking for the wrong words or something, but I could not find reverse proxy which can be configured to dispatch external path to different internal paths.
So please - if the answer is e.g. the Apache mod_proxy - please give me a hint about the parameter names that I should be looking for.
Lastly - I am going to run thin in a FreeBSD OS, but this is not a strong requirement (other *nix OSes are also fine)
Thanks!
It took quite a while, but here is the answer:
A good solution is nginx (pronounced "Engine X").
To reroute all traffic which comes to
https://mycompany.com/external/* to
http://internal-host:1234/internal/* (the asterisk is used as a wildcard) you need to have the following configuration:
location ~ ^/internal/ {
rewrite ^/internal/(.*)$ /$1 break;
proxy_pass http://internal-host:1234;
}
And this approach can be used for all the other addresses - e.g. HR portal, mail, etc.
Finally, to give you a heads up - the following configuration does not work:
location ~ ^/internal/(.*)$ {
proxy_pass http://internal-host:1234/internal/$1;
}
It turns out nginx will always proxypass the whole URI when regex is used, so the rule has to be the one above (which does url-rewrite).
I currently host my company's website and blog on separate servers, reached by separate domain names - www.example.com and www.example.net. This is so I can give blog server access to our partners without compromising security on our main server. However, our SEO guy is now demanding that the blog be put on our main server, as www.example.com/blog.
I would like to maintain the current server separation rather than putting both on the same server. Is there any good way to keep them separated, but have them both under a single domain name? A subdomain would also be acceptable (blog.example.com).
My main website server is a Debian box running Apache 2, and I have full root access to it. The blog server is run by Hostgator, and I have limited access.
Edit: Thanks, all. In this particular situation I don't particularly want to transfer the blog again, and I don't have easy access to the DNS records, so i went with mod_proxy and it worked like a charm. I wish I could give you all "preferred answer" status, though, because all of your information was awesome.
A subdomain would be easy: just create an A record in DNS which maps blog.example.com to the IP address of the blog server, and have another A record in DNS which maps www.example.com to the main website server (this latter record probably already exists).
Would the SEO guy be happy with blog.example.com? It's not the same from an SEO perspective, but it might be good enough for him. I work at a company where SEO is at least 1/3 of what we do, and that's our setup: blog.example.com and www.example.com.
You could try to get fancy and proxy requests to /blog to the 2nd server, if you insist on keeping the blog off your box, but I think you can find a secure way to share space. Proxying like that could get annoying, and it basically doubles the latency to your blog.
Give the blog guys an account on your box; don't give them root/special privileges. If you can get away with it, don't even give them SSH access -- just give them a FTP login (make sure they can't access /var/www), and maybe a mysql account or something. (As you can see, this all depends on how much control/power the blog folks demand.)
Then, just make a symlink to the blog root, so they can write to a restricted area like /home/blog/www and still have it included in the website:
ln -s ~blog/www /var/www/blog
If a subdomain is for some reason not a possible way for you to go, you could use Apache's mod_proxy module to proxy requests to /blog to your second server.
We are putting up a company blog at companyname.com/blog but for now the blog is a Wordpress installation that lives on a different server (blog.companyname.com).
The intention is to have the blog and web site both on the same server in a month or two, but that leaves a problem in the interim.
At the moment I am using mod_rewrite to do the following:
http://companyname.com/blog/article-name redirects to http://blog.companyname.com/article-name
Can I somehow keep the address bar displaying companyname.com/blog even though the content is coming from the latter blog.companyname.com?
I can see how to do this if it is on the same server and vhost, but not across a different server?
Thanks
Rather than using mod_rewrite, you could use mod_proxy to set up a reverse proxy on companyname.com, so that requests to http://companyname.com/blog/article-name are proxied (rather than redirected) to http://blog.companyname.com/article-name.
Here are more instructions and examples.
There is functionality with ZoneEdit called webforwards which could probably do this and hide what you are actually doing (unless someone looked into it).
The only thing that mod_rewrite can do is send HTTP header redirects, and those redirects (across servers) always result in the browser address bar reflecting the reality.
You should instead consider writing a 404 script that 'reflects' the blog. This would essentially be a transparent proxy, and many are already written.
The script would find if the requested page (that was 404'd) started with http://mycompany.com/blog/ . If it did, it would download and then send onto the client the blog page and associated files (probably caching them as well).
So requesting http://mycompany.com/blog/article_xyz would cause the 404 script to download and send http://blog.companyname.com/article_xyz.
It's probably more work than it's worth, but you might be able to design a simple enough 404 script that it's worthwhile.
-Adam