A second virtual host is deaf

Question

Apache 2 and Tomcat 4.0 work together here on an NT as long as httpd.conf sees the Tomcat contexts denoted as a virtual host with the same name as the host : "host1".
So, I am trying now to use a second virtual host "host2" on my machine "host1".
I can still reach the contexts on host1 with http://host1/things
but should this also work? : http://host2/otherthings
must I give my system 2 (two) ip addresses in order to have a second virtual host? Seems strange.

Answer 1

yes and the link you posted before does actually mention this fairly important issue
Of course, you can't just make up names and place them in ServerName or ServerAlias. You must first have your DNS server properly configured to map those names to an IP address associated with your server.i suspect that is you want to test on win network if you don't want to mess about with dns you might be able to do some bejiggery in the LMHOSTS file that would have the same effect.
if you want to just test virtual hosts in general. one thing that also might work is using machine name(s) as well as the ip's
for example if the machine is called host1 and has an address of 192.168.100.10 then i think you could set up three sites.
the "real" (default) site.
192.168.100.10
127.0.0.1
virtual host 1
host1
virtual host 2
localhost
i think these would work although the last one would only work from the server itself. see virtual hosting uses the host header passed in HTTP so as long as you can have different ones that end up going to the same place you can invent some virtual hosts for testing.