I am having a problem with my webserver and virtual hosts. I am a newbie to Linux, so bare with me. I am running SuSE 8.2, Apache 1.3. I want to have 3 separate websites from the one server, but only have one NIC. The webpages will only be viewed on the local LAN, not the internet. I have 3 interfaces configured on the server with the following attributes:

192.168.0.1-----Physical-----www.domain.com
192.168.0.10--- Virtual-------subdomain.domain.com
192.168.0.20----Virtual-------subdomain.domain.com

First, I should ask if it's ok to have all of these interfaces on the same 192.168.0.0 network?? The websites and DNS work fine if I use a browser on the server and type in the 3 separate addresses. My problem is accessing all 3 websites from other computers on the LAN. If I use a different computer on the LAN, I can only get to the Website that is configured on the Physical 192.168.0.1 interface, but not the other 2 on the Virtual Interfaces. Also, the DNS lookups for the 2 virtual interfaces do not work from other computers on the LAN (but work from the server fine)even though I have the DNS server address set to 192.168.0.1 on all computers. The only thing I can think of is that the server is not routing requests from the physical interface to the virtual interfaces. How can I get this to happen? I have tried messing with routing, but nothing has worked. This is probably a no brainer, but I have no idea where to go next. Please Help.

Firstly if you just want different http websites you do NOT need IP aliases on the NIC. You can use the apache virtual server directive to serve different pages.

You say your other computers cannot resolve your domains. Is your UDp/TCP port 53 open on the .1 address. Have you blocked any queries based on IP addresses. Can you ping the 192.168.0.1 address from other computers?

what happens when you do the following from other computers

$nslookup
>server 192.168.0.1
>subdomain.domain.com

Do you get timed out or do you get a reply?


Can you telnet to port 53 from other computers?

$ telnet 192.168.0.1 53

debug a little more and post.

Thank you for the reply. Yes, I can get to port 53 of the 192.168.0.1 computer and yes I can ping. But, like you suggested, I have switched to using Name-Based Virtual Hosts instead of IP-Based virtual hosts and everything works fine now. Thanks for the response.