A Guide to Virtual Services

The point of virtual web services is to present different document trees to users requesting pages from the same machine using different domain names. Users receive the main index page and path names associated with a particular domain name, without any knowledge of the other domains which exist on the same machine.

There are actually two solutions to this problem. The newcomer to the scene uses a fairly elegant method where the client, in its request, also specifies the exact target it was looking for. However, this works only for web services, and only with quite recently released clients from Microsoft and Netscape. If you want to support everybody without relying on the client to make your services work, you will need another solution.

The problem is fairly simple once you understand it. You need a modified HTTP daemon listening to requests coming in to a specific IP address, rather than all those directed to the current machine. Then a server is started for each virtual client, with options specifying different configuration files, document source trees, and so on.

Most web servers now support the requirements for virtual services, but some do not. You will need at least version 1.5 if you use the NCSA server. I use the Apache server, version 1.1.1. Other servers designed as “drop-in” replacements for the NCSA daemon should have this capability, but you should check your server documentation for details on configuring this feature.

To date, almost every server has a different configuration. This article covers the Apache daemon only because it is what the author uses, not because the author considers the server to be more or less capable than any other.

Once you have ping working on the two domain names, you can begin to configure your virtual web services. The most important thing is to select an intelligent document tree layout. If you only have a few clients, you might have a single source root with different subdirectories, one per client. Their tree would then be rooted at their respective subdirectory. If you have more clients, you may need a more complex layout. It is important to decide this now because changing it later can become quite messy.

In your server configuration file, you need to set up services for each domain. This is easily done in Apache by enclosing configuration statements within a <VirtualHost> container. For example, the following configuration for 10.1.1.6 (the IP address we obtained for www.tryme.com) would be changed from:

ServerName www.tryme.com
ServerAdmin webmaster@tryme.com
DocumentRoot /usr/web/tryme/docs
TransferLog /usr/web/tryme/access.log
ErrorLog /usr/web/tryme/errors.log

to:

<VirtualHost 10.1.1.6>
ServerName www.tryme.com
ServerAdmin webmaster@tryme.com
DocumentRoot /usr/web/tryme/docs
TransferLog /usr/web/tryme/access.log
ErrorLog /usr/web/tryme/errors.log
</VirtualHost>

Note that this automatically disables server-hosting, and any other targets must be set up as well, or they will not be accessible. Normally, if a machine had several IP addresses, requests directed at any address would be serviced. Including a <VirtualHost> specification prevents this activity. Also note that virtual hosting in Apache can include an optional port number (e.g., <VirtualHost 10.1.1.6:8080>) to provide services for a specific port.

Once you have this configured, start or restart the web daemon, and you should be configured for virtual web services! Next month we examine virtual e-mail and FTP services, and new techniques that provide similar functionality.