How to confiture virtual hosts with multiple domain names

Question

hello,
I've read through some of the postings here on virtual hosts, but I thought I'd better solicit advice before I actually try some of the things I've read about.
In a nutshell, I've purchased multiple domain names that I'd like to alias to a new site (currently it is just a subfolder in the main site directory) on my OS 10.3.x server. There is only the one main site configured right now on the box, so I know I need to set up a second "virtual site" pointing to the files in this subfolder to make it function as its own site.
I've dabbled around with the sites settings in the GUI, but I'd probably be most comfortable setting all this up in the httpd.conf by hand if I could. But I'm weary of this because I know it might be better to use the GUI because of OS X Server's flavor of WebObjects and Apache (sigh).
So, I have two main questions:
1) How would I set up this second site using the GUI in server settings? Do I need to first move the subfolder out of the main folder before it can be designated its own site? Or can I just point to it in the GUI? Can I use one of my purchased domain names in the domain field?
2) Currently, I have URL Forwarding set with my multiple domain names, but I'm thinking there might be a better way to do this? For SEO I'd rather use some type of redirect rather than being penalized by search engines for having what looks to be multiple domains pointing to the same site.I'm thinking I should create virtual sites for each domain name I've purchased with a hard redirect back to the main site?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks
G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 10.3.9 Server
G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 10.3.9 Server

Answer 1

thank you for your reply.
> You can create each site as a new Site in Server
Admin. When you do this you can choose any
directory on disk as the document root for each
site.This means you can move the sites' folders out of
/Library/WebServer/Documents if you like - you could
create /Library/WebServer/site1,
/Library/WebServer/site2, etc. (or even be outside of
/Library/WebServer if you want).
so, are you are saying that I could designate one site to be
/Library/WebServer/Documents/site1
and another to be
/Library/WebServer/Documents/site1/directory1
even though directory1 is contained within site1's structure? I'm not advancing this as a good idea, necessarily. I'm just wondering if Apache would complain.
> Each site should have the domain name set as per your
registered domains. Apache will need this to
determine the correct site to serve for each
request.
Well, after some additional research I'm thinking I'm missing a critical piece of the puzzle. That being access to the DNS host server that manages the context of my server. I have purchased domain names through an outside registrar that point to my site and I can create virtual hosts on my server, but I don't have the ability to add the new virtual host names into the DNS server that manages my box. If that makes sense. Or maybe I'm missing something?
>
I'm not sure why you're using URL forwarding at all.
Without that piece of information it's impossible to
tell you whether you should continue using them or
not - in general there's no need to use URL
forwarding if you have multiple Virtual Hosts setup,
but it sounds like you have multiple hostnames
pointing to the same content, so your needs may be
different.
I'm using forwarding for the reason I list above. I didn't purchase hosting with the registrar where I purchased my domain names, so they are parked on the registrar's name server with URL forwarding to my server. The DNS server that manages my box resides in a different location and I don't have the ability to add DNS entries pointing to virtual hosts that I want to set up. Am I stuck?
G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9) 10.3.9 Server