How to setup Web Proxy within Server Admin utility?

Question

How to setup Web Proxy within Server Admin utility?

Hi. We currenlty use the Web function within the Server Admin utility for all our web hosting applications running on Snow Leopard server. Recently we had a vendor create a website application which needs a proxy setup in order work. According to them, we need a proxy to 127.0.0.1:8000 for the site. At the moment, they manually edited the .config file for the website to edit the proxy settings which consequently caused the Web function within Server Admin to stop functioning properly as I found a website stating that if a config file is manually edited outside of the Server Admin, the Web function will not function properly. The error message I got was "Uncaught exception raised in Web client-side plugin".

The .config file which was manually edited is as such:

ServerAdmin admin@example.com

ServerName demo.segmentthis.com

ServerAlias demo.segmentthis.com

ProxyRequests off

Order deny,allow

Allow from all

</Proxy>

ProxyPass http://localhost:8000/

ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8000/

</Location>

</VirtualHost>

I supposed my question is, is there a way to edit the proxy within the Web function of Server Admin instead of manually editing the config file?

I hope that made some sense but if not, please let me know and I will try to elaborate a bit more.

Thank you very much for your help!

Xserve, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Apr 11, 2013 5:31 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 11, 2013 7:19 AM in response to Community User

Your question here appears related to or a continuation of this previous question — is this the case?

Based on the previous posting, whatever information you're receiving from the vendor support folks appears rather garbled or confused, particularly based on that "The vendor mentioned that we need to route the DNS and get it working (forwarded) on port 80 and I'd tend to avoid them." comment over there.

I'd ask the vendor for documentation and details (as on its face, a requirement for this proxy seems, well, somewhat questionable), but yes, you're probably in the Apache config files here, and probably using overrides and .htaccess if the site is low-volume, as that'll keep the changes isolated for testing.

Out of curiousity, is this proxy project part of an attempt to get this package to accessible, but without the vendor actually having the package running on port 80? (Got a pointer to the package? We can check the docs, and see if we can translate the installation requirements into something useful on OS X Server.)

Are you running 10.5 or 10.6? Both are pretty old releases.

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Answer 2

Apr 11, 2013 9:01 AM in response to MrHoffman

Hi. Yes, it is a continuation of my last post but the web application is working currently with the manual edit of the config file which, unfortunately, causes the Web function of Server Admin to not function properly for some apparent reason.
The funny and sad part is when I asked me about any documentation pertaining to this application, they stated they didn’t write any while they were creating the application. ** On a side-note, I came into this project more than 90% of its completion **. So it has been rather cumbersome trying to get much information out of them.
All the files they had crated was via javascript/sql, I did not notice any index.html/php, etc. which I could use to point as the landing page within the Web function which is also how all the other web hosted sites are setup. Hence, why this has been a pain.

We are currently running 10.6 … We could move to the newer server version but that would entail us starting from scratch with all that is setup on the mac server currently.

Thank you!

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Answer 3

Apr 11, 2013 1:04 PM in response to Community User

These sorts of problems, and no documentation? Escalate this situation to your management, and allow them to sort this out.

It is quite possible to for "naked" Javascript to be used as you described, but the Javascript itself is also the web server. That Javascript does not involve any configuration within the Apache web server, it's started through some other means — launchd would be one option on OS X, and there are others — and the code then opens the specified port and provides its own web server. This is supposition, however.

There's either an error in the previous edit, or the edit is incompatible with Server Admin. Check the system logs for details. With Apache, there's also a command-line configuration test mechanism which can detect various errors. The following is an example of the command:

$ apachectl configtest

Syntax OK

$

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