Multiple web servers - OS X Mavorics Server

Please provide a little more explanation of how these two web servers will be working together; are you seeking to configure an Apache reverse proxy and pass through a connection? To use DNS-based load balancing? Something else?

Multiple web sites work within the context of a web server by having the host name specified by the client system and entirely on the client system passed over the HTTP or HTTPS connection, and that text string is then used to match and select the target web site to display to the connection. For the purposes of a virtual host within the web server, a host address works the same way.

The IP Address drop down just specifies which IP address THAT server will use to host a website it has. If you had a server with multiple IP addresses and multiple sites, you could specify which sites were hosted on each IP address.

If you want to host different sites on each server, then each server should be configured individually with a static IP address and hostname, and you would use DNS to point each site to its respective server using CNAME or A records.

For example, say you have five sites. Site 1, 2, 3, etc. Sites 1-3 are hosted on server A and sites 4 and 5 are hosted on server B. You would configure each server with it's own static IP address and hostname A record such as:

A 1.1.1.1 server-a.example.com

A 2.2.2.2 server-b.example.com

Then you could use CNAME records to resolve site1.example.com to server A and site4.example.com to server B and so on and so on.

I'm sure others in the community will have some other suggestions but that is how I would approach it. Hope that helps.

Another option might be to setup one server as a reverse proxy. The public facing server could just be a tunnel to the other server for the additional content. This setup, however, is not possible through the GUI and you would need to manually edit your configuration files.

Message was edited by: MplsEE08

grglatt wrote:

That was a thought I have had, however I only have one WAN. I would like to have the machine's be able to differentiate between which server is hosting what (Basically, an internal DNS - where my 'admin' server (server A) sends the traffic off to another server where that site is hosted).

With a sufficiently-capable gateway-firewall box, you can port-forward on different ports, but that won't work for default TCP port 80 HTTP and TCP port 443 HTTPS connections. Connections to 8080 can be port-forwarded to the alternate server, for instance. This requires either visiting the server via embedded links with the port specified, or by directly specifying the link with the port in the address bar.

As MplsEE08 mentions, you can use a reverse web proxy. Discussed earlier here, here and here, as well as in the mod_proxy documentation available at the Apache web site and elsewhere. Unfortunately not available via the GUI.

If this is comparatively "private" stuff, then a VPN can get you a connection onto the local network, and avoid the port forwarding and the reverse proxy requirements.

Depending on the requirements, nothing requires the contents of a web page to be served from the server you're connecting to, either. It's trivial to assemble a single page view using data and HTML that's pulled in from other local web servers.

If sounds like each server has it's own IP. Just use DNS to send the web traffic between the two servers. Each site has its own domain name, point it to whichever server you think it's load fits.

RKD in OOKC wrote:

If sounds like each server has it's own IP. Just use DNS to send the web traffic between the two servers. Each site has its own domain name, point it to whichever server you think it's load fits.

AFAIK, internal IP addresses won't help here. The network configuration would need multiple public, external — outside the NAT box — IP addresses, or multiplexing access using port-based forwarding where that's available in the NAT box, or the VPN, or the reverse web proxy.