Multiple webservers with different ports

Question

Hi!
I've set up a Mac OS X Server with a web service for wikis and blogs on the default port 80. In addition to that I'm using another webserver coming from my FTP application (a HTTP web-file-manager) on port 8000. I can connect to both servers, but to the FTP WFM just by defining port 8000 in the URL. (http://myserver.home:8000)
Now my question is how can I bypass the need to specify the port 8000 when connecting to the FTP WFM? Is there a possibility I can assign a subdomain for this port? (like http://ftp.myserver.home links to http://myserver.home:8000)
Thanks so much in advance,
criuz

Answer 1

You can do it via Apache's proxy module where the connection comes into Apache which simply passes the connection to the FTP server. The FTP server replies back to Apache which then relays the data back to the client.
To do this you'll need to enable mod_proxy and mod_rewrite (via Server Admin), then edit your web site's configuration file directly (you can't do this via the Server Admin GUI).
Then you have to somehow identify the traffic that should be proxied. There are two common options:
The first option is to setup a separate virtual host (e.g. 'www.yourdomain.com' for the main web site and 'www-ftp.domain.com' for the web file manager), where all traffic to this second site should be proxied.
The second option is to use some kind of path prefix such as /ftp so that http://www.yourdomain.com/ftp/anything.html is proxied to the FTP server.
Once you decide on that the process is the same, but you can't really continue until you decide that (you could, of course, use them both if you wanted).
In the first case where you want to proxy all traffic to the virtual host, edit the virtualhost's configuration file (either in /etc/httpd/sites/ or in /etc/apache2/sites/ depending on whether you're running Apache 1.3 or 2.x)
Add a line at the bottom like:
<pre class=command>RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://localhost:8000/$1 \[P,QSA,L\]</pre>
This somewhat cryptic command tells apache to match all URLs and proxy them to the server at localhost:8000.
The process is the same for the second form (where you use a URL prefix on the main site) except that you edit the main site's configuration file and need to edit the RewriteRule to match the leading string, like:
<pre class=command>RewriteRule ^/ftp/(.*)$ http://localhost:8000/$1 \[P,QSA,L\]</pre>
This tells Apache to only proxy requests that begin with /ftp in the URL. This /ftp is not passed to the target server, so you don't need to change URLs on the server, just remember to add them in your browser if you want to get to the FTP server.