Vhost_alias & more

Hi,

I'm trying to set up on an apache 2.0 server the following configuration:

http://mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/_
http://www.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/www
http://sub1.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/sub1
http://sub2.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/sub2
http://*.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/_

I can do that with several <VirtualHost> with different ServerName, but
I don't want annoyed me by adding a new directive for each subdomain.

I've tried the VirtualDocumentRoot in that way:
VirtualDocumentRoot /home/mydomain.net/%-3+
and it works pretty good for existing subdomain, but I've got an 404
error for other domain.
So how can I keep this setting but redirecting unexisting subdomain (no
folder in /home/mydomain.net/) to a default one ?

Regards,

Matthieu

Matthieu <news@plouk.net> wrote in news:43c0f55a$0$21206
$626a54ce@news.free.fr:

> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to set up on an apache 2.0 server the following
configuration:
>
> http://mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/_
> http://www.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/www
> http://sub1.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/sub1
> http://sub2.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/sub2
> http://*.mydomain.net => /home/mydomain.net/_
>
> I can do that with several <VirtualHost> with different ServerName, but
> I don't want annoyed me by adding a new directive for each subdomain.
>
> I've tried the VirtualDocumentRoot in that way:
> VirtualDocumentRoot /home/mydomain.net/%-3+
> and it works pretty good for existing subdomain, but I've got an 404
> error for other domain.
> So how can I keep this setting but redirecting unexisting subdomain (no
> folder in /home/mydomain.net/) to a default one ?

I personally wouldn't clutter up the home directory with resources
devoted to virtual hosts. It makes more sense to logically separate them
in a single directory:

/var/www/hosts/example.com
/var/www/hosts/www.example.com
/var/www/hosts/support.example.com

Then, to use simplified mass virtual hosting, you could put this in a
single VirtualHost directive:

VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/hosts/%0/site

This will match the host in the request, and automatically serve its
pages. For example:

http://www.example.com/index.html

would represent this file:

/var/www/hosts/www.example.com/site/index.html

If you want to use the same files for different hosts, just create
symlinks:

ln -s /var/www/hosts/www.example.com /var/www/hosts/example.com

As for directing hosts that have no configuration in apache (but resolve
to the same IP) to a default set of pages, you might be able to specify a
default IP-based virtual host before your name-based ones:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.2>
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/hosts/example.com/site
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/hosts/%0/site
UseCanonicalName Off
</VirtualHost>

There are pros and cons to this scenario. Mass virtual hosting is
convenient because configuration only requires a DNS record to be added.
Use of a default host to catch all other requests to the IP can be handy
when dealing with probes, but I probably wouldn't use it for anything
important. Finally, pointing multiple names to the same set of pages can
dilute your search engine rankings. YMMV.