Weird wiki / website / alias (?) problem

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Level 1

90 points

Weird wiki / website / alias (?) problem

Hi all,

I am hosting a website (www.behavioral.neuroscience.org) using Lion Server that has an associated wiki for my lab...

If users go to behavioralneuroscience.org (no prefix), www.behavioralneuroscience.org, or any other prefix (e.g., ttt.behavioralneuroscience.org), the main website comes up...

If users go to behavioralneuroscience.org/wiki/projects (no prefix), or use any other prefix EXCEPT "www", the wiki comes up...

HOWEVER, going to www.behavioralneuroscience.org/wiki/projects yields the following error:

Not Found. The requested URL /wiki/projects was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

This is more annoying than anything, I can tell users to just NOT included the "www" when they are sending links, using the wiki, etc, but for some reason everyone wants to include the "www" and I'm getting lots of complaints about the wiki being down because they are getting that error....

I have a feeling this is some alias-related problem, but I have not been able to nail it down... any ideas?

thanks in advance,

Rich

Posted on Feb 28, 2012 10:20 AM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Feb 28, 2012 10:52 AM in response to RHartman

Have you set ALL the various hostnames under you various site's configuration?

Apache looks at the hostname of the request when determining which site configuration to use when serving content.

If you have one site configured with the hostname 'www.behavioralneuroscience.org' then that configuration will only be used if that exact hostname is used in the request. Other hostnames (e.g. ttt., no prefix, etc.) won't match and will use the default configuration if no specific match is found.

The solution is to make sure you list ALL relevant hostnames within the site's configuration, using the Aliases field in Server.app. Alternatively, if you want all hits to serve the same content, regardless of hostname, then have one site with an * for aliases, so that it matches all requests.

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Answer 2

RHartman Author

Level 1

90 points

Feb 28, 2012 11:44 AM in response to Camelot

Thanks for the reply! I do have an "*" entry under the Alias field that points to the default directory... I tried removing that to see if it changed the behavioral that I described, but it did not (so I put it back in)...

anyway, this seems to be a problem ONLY with the wiki, and ONLY with "www", and no matter what fields in Server.app that I manipulate, I can't find the one that will let me go to www.behavioralneuroscience.org/wiki/projects.

any other ideas? (or perhaps I did not fully understand what you meant?)

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