How to Allow Access from Hostname in .htaccess on Apache 2.2

apache-2.2linuxUbuntuweb-server

Ubuntu 9.10
Apache2

Hi Guys,

Long story short, I need to restrict access to a certain part of my web site based on a dynamic IP source address that changes every now and then. Historically, I've just added the following to htaccess…

order deny,allow
deny from all
# allow my dynamic IP address
allow from <dynamic ip>

But the problem is that I'll have to manually make this change every time the IP changes.

Ideally I'd like to specify a hostname instead… something like: 

order deny,allow
deny from all
# allow my host
allow from hostname.whatever.local

That doesn't seemed to have worked though. I get an error 403 – access forbidden. Does .htaccess not support hostnames?

Best Answer

That would most likely because Apache doesn't look up the hostname in the direction you are thinking. Instead of looking hostname.whatever.local and allowing that address it does a reverse lookup on the connecting ip address, seeing if the response matches the allowed name.

(Well, actually Apache is doing a double lookup, first a reverse lookup and then a forward lookup on the result of the reverse.)

As the issue is about a dynamic ip address I assume it's PTR isn't simply changed constantly.

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