Proxy/ReverseProxy and Apache2

2008-08-16

I recently configured Apache2 to be a ReverseProxy/Proxy and thought I would share my experiences while it was still fresh. Having never configured any kind of proxy, I found this webpage very informative. The scenario I would like to use for my example is that I have three internal web servers called

SITE	LOCAL IP	REMOTE IP	PORT
www.reallycoolsite.com	192.168.1.102	10.15.22.1	80
www.justcoolsite.com	192.168.1.102	10.15.22.2	80
www.reallylamesite.com	192.168.1.44	10.15.22.3	80

Alright…pretty straight forward right? If you are in a situation that I was when I started, you haven’t done much more than install apache from source and added a few modules here and there occasionally. The way I solved the problem was to create name-based virtual host for each of the servers. our example would look like

#you can listen on specific ports for requests if you like
#(ex->Listen 192.168.1.102:80)
#I use the below statement to listen on 80 for all requests
Listen *:80
#Because we have multiple names mapped to same ip
NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.102:80

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.102:80 >
    ServerName www.reallycoolsite.com
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPass / http://10.15.22.1/
    ProxyReverse / http://www.reallycoolsite.com/
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ErrorLog reallycoolsite_error_log
    CustomLog reallycoolsite_access_logs
</VirtualHost >

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.102:80 >
    ServerName www.justcoolsite.com
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPass / http://10.15.22.2/
    ProxyReverse / http://www.justcoolsite.com/
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ErrorLog justcoolsite_error_log
    CustomLog justcoolsite_access_logs
</VirtualHost >

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.44:80 >
    ServerName www.reallylamesite.com
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPass / http://10.15.22.3/
    ProxyReverse / http://www.reallylamesite.com/
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ErrorLog reallylamesite_error_log
    CustomLog reallylamesite_access_logs
</VirtualHost >

If you receive errors during the communication of your proxy and your server, it may be a good idea to investigate if you have an http protocol error discussed at the bottom of this page

The following two lines are pulled from the reference and fixed a problem I had with one of my IIS servers using SSL(for more info about the issue, go here)

    SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
    SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1

My apache configuration file(httpd.conf) was the file I used to edit my settings.. Your file may be different depending on how new your apache version is. I found that some implementations called the configuration file apache.conf…. I hope this blog entry is helpful you, Happy Configuring!