Apache VirtualHost answering when I browse to IP address

apache-2.2virtualhost

I've got a standard build of RHEL6 and I used to be able to browse to the server's DocumentRoot using the IP address.

I've since added these two vhosts (just the top section is shown). For some reason, now when I access the server's IP address, the Vhost answers and the wrong DocumentRoot is used.

I don't really want to explicitly define a Vhost for /var/www/html.

Another note… I have added NameVirtualHost *:80 to httpd.conf.

Any ideas why the vhosts are answering this?

==> axxx-http.conf <==

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin beren@xxyy.com
ServerName xxyy.com
ServerAlias www.xxyy.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/site
<Directory /var/www/site>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all

==> axxx-ssl.conf <==

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName xxyy.com
    ServerAlias www.xxyy.com
    ServerAlias admin.xxyy.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/site
<Directory /var/www/site>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All

Best Answer

When you start to use virtual hosts on a webserver you have to make a virtual host for the normal server too. If you don't create one, the first virtual host defined will be the default one for any connections to the server not matched by another virtual host ServerName or ServerAlias directive.

Check the section "Main host goes away" on this URL for this explanation:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/name-based.html

Related Solutions

Apache2 Permission denied: access to / denied

Remove:

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all

Apache2 multiple hostnames redirected to one

To be fairly honest with you, the best approch i can see for this would be if you setup your main domain normally like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/domain 
</virtualhost>

Then you create a new virtualhost that will hold all domains you want to redirect like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias foo.example.com bar.example.com others.example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/redirect_folder 
</virtualhost>

Inside that folder make a simple index.php page that summons the 301 so any domains hold in there will be redirect to your main domain with the 301 code.

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?>

Why do you think it is better this way ?

This way you won't have to keep updating a bunch of places everytime you have a new domain to hold and redirct to your main domain and it won't be serving your users with the current name but will actually redirect them to your main domain in question.

If you are the server owner you can make it even better, you can put the 2nd virtualhost as the first virtualhost in your httpd.conf of vhost.conf file and whenever you hit the IP of your server it will lead you to the redirection page which will lead your users to the main domain in this case instead of having to set a bunch of ServerAlias you can just create the DNS A record for that given subdomain or domain leading to your IP and the server will take care of the rest.

In this last case all you would need for your virtual host would be:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/redirect_folder 
</virtualhost>

as you dont need the ServerAlias since every and each request that hits your server IP will go to your first vhost.

In addition if you wanted to do this using .htaccess, it would be something like this i belive:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^foo.example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Related Topic