[QCLUG] VPS setup

[Mark Riedesel]

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I'm unfamiliar with Spry specifically, but I'm familiar with virtual hosts
in Apache and Lighty, so.. I can at least attempt explaining the terms you
mentioned by means of an exciting tale about a browser's request for a
website and the journey of packets.

One day Freddy Firefox heard about a fascinating website by the name of
yummypancakes.com. All Freddy had was the domain name "yummypancakes.com"
but Freddy knows you need an IP address to communicate with other systems on
the internet, so Freddy asked his friend Donny DNS if he knows what the IP
address for yummypancakes.com is - but Donny DNS is unfamiliar with that
domain name so he looks in the phonebook to see which NameServers are
responsible for yummypancakes.com. Donny sees Nelly NS listed  at the top of
the page as the primary nameserver for the domain Freddy is interested in,
so he contacts Nelly NS and asks her about yummypancakes.com, Nelly NS
gladly returns the A record for yummypancakes.com back to Donny DNS, the
record includes the IP address at which to contact the
yummypancakes.comserver as well as some other related information.
Donny DNS passes the IP
address back to Freddy Firefox, now that Freddy has the IP address for
yummypancakes.com he can make his HTTP request. So Freddy Firefox reads the
IP address carefully, picks up his socket connector and begins dialing the
IP address, momentarily the other end of the socket connects to the
webserver, then Freddy Firefox says...

"GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla Firefox
Host: yummypancakes.com
Accept: */* "

The webserver at the other end listened intently, and checked his
configuration for a mention of yummypancakes.com in his virtual hosting
lists, upon finding the entry he looked up the document root for
yummypancakes.com on his hard disks and looked for an index.html file, there
was one there, so he replied to Freddy..

"HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
And then he proceeded to read the contents of the index.html file to Freddy
Firefox.

Then Sammy Safari called up the same webserver, at the same IP because he
was interested in checking out the product_list.html file, so Sammy said...

"
GET /product_list.html HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh) Safari
Host: www.fancyblackturtlenecks.com
Accept: */*
"
Then mister webserver checked his virtualhost listings once again, and found
the product_list.html file in fancyblackturtlenecks.com document root and
read it to Sammy Safari.

Then Igor Internet Explorer sneezed abruptly, shooting pop-ups everywhere
which caused him to hit himself in the face his juicebox and fall off his
chair.

The End.

************
Short version:
 You can have many websites (domain names) pointing to the same webserver
(with a single IP, or multiple IPs, or whatever) since the people that
designed the HTTP protocol were smart enough to include the desired hostname
within the client's request.

I bet you all want pancakes now,
Mark






On 3/13/07, Juanita Moore <jjmoore@att.net> wrote:
>
> Forgive me if this is off-topic!  Well, the server is running Unix . . .
> is that close enough?  I figure there's gotta be several of you at least
> who are familiar with setting up server accounts.  This is with Spry and
> while I know I can follow instructions, what I am finding seems
> incomprehensible to me!  The WHM (web host manager) is very full
> featured and has functions I probably won't need for quite a while.  All
> I want to do is set up web sites!
>
> I'm sure a lot of my confusion has to do with terminology that is
> obscure to me, like nameservers, host names, etc. Primary, secondary,
> tertiary, nameservers?  Can each IP have many site names?  Even after
> reading the "definition" on wikipedia, I'm still not quite sure.
>
> I won't go into any more detail unless someone thinks he can help--we
> can go to private email rather than cluttering up this list.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Juanita
>
> _______________________________________________
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> QCLUG@qclug.org
> http://qclug.org/mailman/listinfo/qclug
>



-- 
Mark Riedesel <mriedesel@gmail.com>
Klowner's Wallpapers
http://www.klowner.com

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