[TriLUG] Re: HTTP & different ports; routing & stuff

[Jeremy Portzer]

> For example: Listen 192.168.1.1 8080
> This lets apache serve clients connecting to the specified NIC/IP and
> port.
>                                                                                                 
> Does it really need to be more complicated than this?  Maybe Im missing
> something.

Ryan,

I think he wants to avoid having to use the alternate ports in 
public-facing URLs.  The problem is that many people have firewalls that 
prevent outgoing connections on less common ports, but usually allow port 
80.  In addition, clueless users sometimes don't understand the :port 
notation on URLs, and get confused if/when they leave it off.  Therefore, 
an attractive solution is to use port 80 for both services with mod_proxy 
or similar to route the requests.

I do something similar with a web application at my employer.  
http://server.example.com:8000/ is the real application, and users can 
connect there if they wish, but they can also connect via 
http://appname.example.com/ which forwards everything to the former URL.  
In my case I set up an Apache virtual host and use the ProxyPass and 
ProxyPassReverse directives.

http://members.trilug.org/tripaste/ works in a similar fashion, since the
tripaste perl bot actually runs its own web server on a different port,
but we wanted to integrate it with the members.trilug.org web site.

Hope this helps,
Jeremy

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