In the authors’ experience, most of the Web still uses IP-based hosting, because although almost all clients use browsers that support HTTP 1.1, there is still a tiny portion that doesn’t, and who wants to lose business unnecessarily? However, the Internet is running out of IP addresses, and people are gradually moving to name-based hosting.
This is how to configure Apache to do IP-based virtual hosting. The Config file is as follows:
User webuser Group webgroup # we don't need a NameVirtualHost directive <VirtualHost 192.168.123.2> ServerName www.butterthlies.com ServerAdmin sales@butterthlies.com DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.virtual/htdocs/customers ErrorLog /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.virtual/IP-based/logs/error_log TransferLog /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.virtual/IP-based/logs/access_log </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost 192.168.123.3> ServerName sales-IP.butterthlies.com ServerAdmin sales@butterthlies.com DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.virtual/htdocs/salesmen ErrorLog /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.virtual/IP-based/logs/ error_log TransferLog /usr/www/APACHE3/APACHE3/site.virtual/IP-based/logs/access_log </VirtualHost>
We don’t need a NameVirtualHost
directive, but we do need ServerName directives in
each of the VirtualHost blocks. This setup
responds nicely to requests to
http://www.butterthlies.com and
http://sales-IP.butterthlies.com. The way our
machine was configured, it also served up the
customers’ page to a request on
http://sales.butterthlies.com — which is to
be expected since they share a common IP number. This method applies
to sites that use SSL — see Chapter 11 for more
details. However, the basic issue derives from the fact that
certificate processing takes place before the server sees the
Host header.