What would be the best set up to direct incoming web requests to servers serving different domains?

I have have a cheap router and am not capable of doing this. Is there a how to on how to set up a linux router to do this? Should I be looking at using Squid as a reverse proxy? I Googled for quite a while now with no success.

You want to look at the Virtual Hosts support in Apache, which will allow you to have multiple web sites using different domains all pointed to the same IP address. But be aware this does not work for SSL connections.

I want to run 2 different web servers that server for 2 different domains with one IP. So requests for domain a go to server 1 and requests for domain b goto server 2. I do not want to run both on the same server.

I have 2 old PC acting as web servers now. On the one I run Zope behind Apache and the other runs Apache, MYSQL and Sendmail.

I am just not sure what I need to do to. I rather go with a Linux box acting as a router (low on cash). But I am not sure excatly how to set it up.

To do this you need to look at the Virtual Hosts page on Apache's website. However you also need to run the dns for the Hosts. Example. If i'm hosts www.dogs.com and www.cats.com I would need to run the dns so my computer processes the request for www.dogs.com or www.cats.com and not for the ip address. I recommend bind for running a dns. I use virtual hosts to run my imaps mail servers and two websites with great success.

Thanks, I play around with it.

Kewl, setting up a linux box as a router is not too hard, I run my network through one of my slack boxes. I would recommend you learn iptables since you will be running your own firewall and router. need any help, just let me know.

This will be difficult and you will not be able to do it with iptables. The domain part of the web request is in the http data and this is what Apache looks at to handle virtual hosts. To have one IP address and route requests to different servers behind a firewall based on the domain name will require a proxy of some kind that can peek at the http data.

Firewall rules work only with IP addresses. They can lookup host names in their rule sets from DNS, but the the incoming traffic will only have IP addresses and not domain names. So this rules out iptables port forwarding.

There are several ways to do this, but you are right, iptables won't route by domain. If I was going to remote host like you say, I would just nfs the remote into the box running apache and then point to the nfs dir for the virtual host.

Quick question:

Are you trying to share the load between the 2 servers?


dan

No, just want to server 2 website with different domains on seperate servers.

Unless there is a very specific reason to have sites on different computers, as mentioned above, use virtual hosts on one computer to host both sites.




dan