Re: [Bodington-developers] Abolute URLs - Bug or Bug Fix?

[Matthew B. <mat...@ou...>]

Jon Maber wrote:
> Matthew Buckett wrote:
>> The primary advantage is that you no longer have to configure Bodington 
>> to get it running. This makes the quickstart just work. It also means if 
>> you decide to change the hostname that Bodington is deployed under you 
>> don't have to perform any reconfiguration other than to your servlet 
>> container.
>>   
> So how about one or two extra bodington.properties entries for my use?

Why not just use the ones that were defined before?

>> Why would you want to serve a Website up under several names?
>> I can see this may have been an argument 5 years ago when there where 
>> clients that didn't support HTTP/1.0 and so didn't work with virtual 
>> hosts but this is 2006. Hosting a website under multiple domains leaves 
>> you a little exposed to spoofing attacks as users no longer rely on 
>> looking at the URL bar to determine if they are at the correct site.
>>   
> You may not _want_ to have multiple names but sometimes you don't get a 
> choice.  My problem is that the server is also 'localhost' which I was 
> using in my Apache configuration.  However the problem for others is 
> that the official name might change - e.g. Bodington Common at Leeds was 
> on www.fldu.leeds.ac.uk but a new name vle.leeds.ac.uk was adopted.

Redirects are a much better way of handling this as it prevents people 
from bookmarking the old hostname.

 > The
> old alias is needed to handle links into the VLE from other web sites 
> but the new name is the official one.  The multiple names will also 
> occur if the physical server has multiple functions, e.g. 
> mail.uni.ac.uk, www.uni.ac.uk etc.  The configured server name forces 
> the user to access the proper url.

With any half decent web server you have the choice over what content is 
served up for a particular domain.

>> I can see that this is a valid use of the old setup and hadn't though of it.
>>
>> It should be reasonably easy to support using the bodington.properties 
>> if they are set and if not falling back the request properties.
>>   
> That would also require a change to the setup servlet since setting the 
> port numbers and server name seems to be compulsory.

That should be a bug then as I was under the impression that they were 
optional.

>> Have you considered using AJP rather than mod_proxy which will preserve 
>> the orginal URLs (I believe) so you don't hit this problem.
>>
>> http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/connectors.html
>>   
> I did and I can't remember why I rejected it. Possible because mod_proxy 
> is very easy to set up.

Ok.

>> It was previously an undocumented feature ;-)
>>   
> O.K., how about this;  change the text of the setup servlet to indicate 
> that the server name is only required if the users could access the 
> server using multiple names.  Then the code that constructs absolute 
> URLs for inclusion in HTML can use the server name in the properties 
> file but if not set use the server name in the request. Similarly the 
> port numbers - use the values from the properties file if available.

Yep.

> There is still a problem with your no-configuration option.  When the 
> user is switched from non-secure to secure for their password how can 
> you determine the right port number if it isn't configured by the 
> sysadmin using setup servlet?

The quickstart doesn't switch to https.

-- 
  -- Matthew Buckett, VLE Developer
  -- Learning Technologies Group, Oxford University Computing Services
  -- Tel: +44 (0)1865 283660 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/