Reverse proxy OPTIONS request

Question

Hi all,
After recommendation, I am using the reverse proxy in Sun Web Server 7.0 to send requests to my web application in Tomcat. In my Tomcat web.xml, I have configured all requests (no extension or path) to be handled by a dispatcher servlet. I have a session filter which needs the HTTP host to setup the session correctly. This works fine but every so often I get a null pointer exception. On closer inspection, I can see this in the error log:
[28/Sep/2009:22:26:31] info ( 2308): trying to OPTIONS http://localhost:90, check-http-server reports: HTTP7750: server localhost:90 online
Is this the reverse proxy? Can I get round this somehow without changes to my application?
Thanks,
Surjit

Answer 1

I'd fix the Servlet filter. It sounds broken. I think I may have to do something in the servlet filter like ignore requests with OPTIONS methods. I'll try to give a bit more explanation; we are supporting multiple countries so we have the following domains:
http://uk.mysite.com/
http://fr.mysite.com/
http://de.mysite.com/
etc.
These domains all point to the same webserver and java requests are reverse proxied to the same Tomcat web application as we have a single codebase that serves all countries. The web application session filter will use the country code from the server host (e.g. xx.mysite.com) to setup the session so we can show the correct language to the user.
The reverse proxy setup has been setup like this in obj.conf:
<Object name="reverse-proxy-/">
Route fn="set-origin-server" server="localhost:90"
</Object>I use localhost as I don't need to specify any country specific domain here. This works fine but the reverse proxy health check will send localhost as the server host to the tomcat instance. The session filter tries to map localhost in our country lookup mapping which doesnt exist and then throws a null pointer exception.
That said, I get the impression you want to send
requests to a single Tomcat instance on the local host. No, this is just for development purposes. In production we will use the reverse proxy to load balance over 4 JBoss servers so we will need the set origin SAF.
Thanks,
Surjit