At 1:25 AM -0400 6/13/00, Sean Murphy wrote:
>Perhaps I should've said this at the outset; my goal is to host two domains
>on the one machine. Correct me if I'm wrong but I understand that an alias
>will link the one IP address to the other, which I don't believe would do
>the trick.

It's more like linking multiple IPs to a single interface than to each other.

>IF anyone has any other suggestions as to how I might accomplish the task of
>hosting multiple domains, I'm more than open to them!

The syntax you first quoted is for Solaris, though it might work for Linux.

I think your question may be about Apache configuration as much as 
network configuration.  There are two kinds of virtual hosts:  name 
based and IP based.  In the latter case you can have a single 
interface with multiple IP numbers.  Apache can be configured to look 
at the IP number and select the virtual host accordingly.

In the former case you configure DNS to direct multiple names to a 
single IP number.  Then you configure Apache to select the virtual 
host based on the request header provided by the browser itself for 
the purpose.  This works for all reasonably current browsers, but you 
can then provide a default virtual host  which will allow the 
remainder to get in.

I left out a step:  you need to configure Apache with some rewrite 
rules which will translate http://coA.com/ into http://host.com/coA/. 
Assume that you have a real domain name of host.com and are providing 
web service for coA.com, coB.com. . . all of which are CNAMEs for 
host.com.  Anyone who doesn't/can't recognizably connect to one of 
the coX.com virtual hosts gets dumped into the host.com generic page 
where you provide a list of already-rewritten links to the various 
individual companies.  There are some docs at the Apache site which 
describe how to do this.

Having done it I can say it works pretty well.  OTOH if you can get 
multiple real IP numbers that's better.


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