IP assignment for virtual webhosting

Thu May 11 16:37:08 CEST 2000

There was a solution for this on this list a few days ago...

How to move a hostname based virtual webserver:

I have to webservers A and B (10.0.0.1) and (10.0.0.2) and want to move
site www.cust.com from A to B

The config on A is at the moment

<VirtualHost 10.0.0.1>
ServerName www.cust.com
DocumentRoot ...
</VirtualHost>

Now move the data to B, change the nameserver entry for www.cust.com to
point to 10.0.0.2 and create a www2.cust.com also to point to 10.0.0.2. The
config file on B becomes

<VirtualHost 10.0.0.2>
ServerName www.cust.com
ServerAlias www2.cust.com
DocumentRoot ...
</VirtualHost>

and the config on A becomes

<VirtualHost 10.0.0.1>
ServerName www.cust.com
Redirect / http://www2.cust.com/
</VirtualHost>

So all request still coming in into A are redirected to the new name www2
(no DNS cache) and the DNS servers that are up to date go directly to B.
Wait some time and remove the www2 entry from the DNS and clean up the
config files.

------------------------------------------------
BS Web Services
Roedingsmarkt 14
20459 Hamburg
Germany

info at bsmail.de
www.bsws.de

fon: +49 40 3750357-0
fax: +49 40 3750357-5

PLEASE USE EMAIL WHERE POSSIBLE

                    Daniel Roesen                                                                                                
                    <noc at entire-sy        To:     lir-wg at ripe.net                                                                
                    stems.com>            cc:                                                                                    
                    Sent by:              Subject:     Re: IP assignment for virtual webhosting                                  
                    owner-lir-wg at r                                                                                               
                    ipe.net                                                                                                      

                    11.05.00 16:27                                                                                               

On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 04:09:45PM +0200, Herbert Baerten wrote:
> And I agree with Daniel that accounting is a very important issue here.
> Security is another one, firewalls being configured based on source and
> destination IP addresses.

And another (although minor) point: you loose flexibilty.
Situation: you want to move a bunch of domains hosted on server A to
another server B because of system load or whatever.

With name-based vhosting you have to do the usual DNS changes and wait
for DNS convergency (DNS cache timeouts) to start the move.

With IP-based vhosting you can act in minutes. Move config over to
server B, take down IP on server A, activate IP on server B and you're
set.

This means in the name-based vhosting case i have about a week (usual
RR TTL) before being able to react on the slashdot effect in contrary
to IP-based vhosting where I'm able to react in minutes. I already
saw several well known sites suffering from exactly THIS problem.
Especially for companies like us with very limited upstream bandwidth.

Best regards,

Daniel Roesen
Entire Systems NOC

--
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