[cobalt-users] Re: Rewrite rule for admnserv/httpd on Raq4 for virtual site admin

["Michelle A. Hoyle" <michelle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I originally wrote:
> I just upgraded from a Raq2 to a Raq4.  I was using Rickard Osser's
> adminserv drop-in package on my Raq2 to do secure admin.  He whipped
> me up some rewrite rules so that when I did:
>
>     http://virtual.site.com/siteadmin/  instead of getting
>     https://virtual.site.com:444/.cobalt/siteManage   \
>      /virtual.site.com/index.html
>
> I got
>     https://my.raq.com:444/.cobalt/siteManage \
>     /virtual.site.com/index.html
>
> which meant that for admin purposes, all the virtual sites on the
> machine could share my root-level certificate.
>
> I thought that this would be the way it worked on the Raq4 since the
> manual sort of implied it but I'm still getting the same behaviour as
> the first example after I manually moved my certificate from the old Raq2
> to the new Raq4 (the name of the machine stayed the same).
>
> Does anyone know how to make admserv/httpd on the Raq4 elicit the
> kind of behaviour I want?  I note that the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
> has a whole whack of prototype rewrites and the
> /etc/admserv/conf/httpd.conf doesn't seem to have any.

Since then, I've discovered that:

In /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, there's a big block (as I mentioned 
earlier) of proto rules for rewriting.  They look like this:

	$rewrite_rules =
	'RewriteEngine On
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)
	RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}            !-d
	RewriteRule .* 
proto://servername:81/.cobalt/error/forbidden.html [L,R]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)
	RewriteRule ^/admin/?$ 
proto://servername:81/.cobalt/sysManage/index.html [L,R]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)
	RewriteRule ^/siteadmin/?$ 
proto://servername:81/.cobalt/siteManage/%1/index.html [L,R]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)
	RewriteRule ^/personal/?$ 
proto://servername:81/.cobalt/personal/index.html [L,R]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)
	RewriteRule ^/.cobalt/(.+) 
proto://servername:81/.cobalt/$1 [L,R]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)
	RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/.cobalt/(.+) 
proto://servername:81/cgi-bin/.cobalt/$1 [L,R]
	';

	$rewrite_rules =~ s/servername/%1/g;
	$rewrite_rules =~ s/proto/$proto/g;


The $rewrite_rules =~ s/servername/%1/g is the one that's causing me 
my trouble.  It rewrites everything to be whatever domain name was 
used to initiate the request, which is where you run into trouble 
with the site certificate not matching the domain name.  If I change 
that line to:
$rewrite_rules =~ s/servername/raq.transcena.com/g;
Which is the name of my server, then it exhibits the behaviour I 
wanted.  However, that's not a very elegant way of doing it.  Anybody 
know how to get %{HOSTNAME} or some other environment variable that 
contains this name in there so that if you change the name of the 
Raq, it will still work later?

Thanks,

M

--

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Michelle A. Hoyle, VP Web Technologies, Canada
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