Re: [cobalt-users] Making a global support area

["Thomas Schmitz" <ts-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 >theirdomain.com/support and they'd automatically get
 >redirected to /home/sites/home/support  (or whever I
 >end up putting it). To see the page, they have to
 >enter their username/password that matches what's in
 >the GUI.

 >... ya think it will work?
 >RewriteRule ^/support/?$ 
 >proto://servername:81/home/sites/home/support/index.html [L,R]
 >RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^([^:]+)

Hi Carrie,

this mod_rewrite statement will unfortunately not work for different 
reasons:

 1. order of RewriteRule / RewriteCond needs to be switched 
 2. option [L,R] doesn't work with absolute filepaths, so 
    your redirection would point to /usr/admserv/html/home/...
    (I don't think you intended to put your support pages in that
     location... ;-)
 3. using only [L] and an absolute path would work for the
    initial html-file, but create problems with the embedded
    images etc. 

Solution:

- put the following .htaccess in your support directory:

order allow,deny
allow from all
require user valid-user
require group home site-adm admin
Authname Support
Authtype Basic

(do not use the /usr/admserv/html/.cobalt/admin/.htaccess as 
previously suggested on this list - this would only allow access to 
the server-admin)

- add the following line to the alias section of httpd.conf (or
  srm.conf (old apache config layout with multiple files)):

Alias /support/ /home/sites/home/support/

Has been tested on my RAQ2+ with Apache 1.3.14.

Regards,
 Thomas