Re: Multiple domains on a single IP

Randy Martin ( randy@austintx.net )
Thu, 12 Jun 1997 15:09:40 -0500

At 07:15 PM 6/12/97 GMT, you wrote:
>On Thu, 12 Jun 1997 14:44:16 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>However, the better solution would be to give a unique IP to the two
>>companies, give your server a hostname on your domain, open IIS and create
>>virtual servers on the two IP's.
>>
>Not a better solution with the running out of IP's.
>
>THATS why http 1.1 has been designed to remove the need to have an IP
>per domain name.
>
>I don't know of any NT based Web Server that supports this however.
>

Both Netscape FastTrack and Enterprise support virtual software servers
(essentially, software domains). They've had this capability since V2.x.
All you do is setup the server to point different domain names to different
document roots. Then setup the DNS to resolve all the domain names to the
same IP address. HTTP 1.1-compliant browsers and the webserver do the rest.

There are some small gotchas involved, however. All the "virtual" domains
actually share the >>SAME<< physical document root. You must configure your
system to have a subdirectory off the main document root for each virtual
domain. For example,

Domain Name Document Root
----------- -------------
www.abc.com c:\docroot
www.def.com c:\docroot\def
www.ghi.com c:\docroot\ghi

Then, in the Netscape server manager, you setup the virtual software
servers as follows:

URL Host: Home Page:
-------------------- ----------
http://www.def.com def/
http://www.ghi.com ghi/

There is one more thing. Because all the domains (virtual software servers)
actually share the same document root, if you have subdirectories off of
the home-page directory (maybe for graphics), and you want to reference the
files in that subdirectory like this:

<IMG SRC="graphics/mypicture.gif">

then you MUST include the following HTML tag in the <HEAD></HEAD> section
of the page:

<BASE HREF="http://www.def.com/def/">

This tag must be included on every page at which anyone might _ENTER_ your
site. If you don't do this, the server won't be able to find the graphics
that are relatively referenced.

Another solution to this problem is to give absolute references for
everything.

<IMG SRC="http://www.def.com/def/graphics/mypicture.gif>

Always, seemed simpler to me to just put in the BASE tag.

Regards,

>Ciao
>
>Drew
>
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>
>
Randy

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