RE: a discussion starter i hope.

["Nathan Cassano" <nathan@cjhunter.com>]

Hi Alan,
 
> Now behind the firewall are 2 separate servers, each running a web
> service and each running on port 80. 
> 
> 1) The question is, with only 1 real world address available to you,
> what suggestions do you guy's have as to the configuration required to
> make both web servers available on the Internet ? So that incoming
port
> 80 request on the firewall public interface go to the correct server. 


If you are solely interested in distributing http requests from a single
access point I would suggest running apache as a reverse proxy on your
firewall. This way http requests for different domains can be directed
to different internal (or external) web servers. Optionally this could
be done on layer 4 with DNAT, by rewriting the destination of packets
and perhaps adding a user level program to direct packets but I am less
knowledgeable about the implementation of such a setup.

Here is a simple example of a reverse proxy apache configuration.

<VirtualHost *:80>

 DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache/htdocs/server.tld"
 ServerName public.server.tld

 # Rewrite URL to back-end server URL
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteLog logs/proxy_rewrite
 RewriteLogLevel 0

 RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www1.server.internal/$1 [P]

 # Reverse Proxy the requested URL

 ProxyRequests on
 ProxyVia on
 ProxyPassReverse / http://www1.server.internal/

</VirtualHost>