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Mr Aleph
Asked: 2012-01-28 06:53:26 +0800 CST

Apache reverse proxy with VirtualHost not serving a page

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I have an Apache reverse proxy set to move requests to a Tomcat Applet. The config is similar to:

<VirtualHost 100.100.100.100:80>
    ProxyPass /AppName/App http://1.1.1.1/AppName/App
    ProxyPassReverse /AppName/App http://1.1.1.1/AppName/App
</VirtualHost>

I also have a page called summary.html that exists on 1.1.1.1 as:

http://1.1.1.1/AppName/summary.html

When I browse directly to it I have no problem viewing it, however if I try to get there via the reverse proxy I get a blank page. Wireshark shows me a 503, but this one is coming from the Apache reverse proxy (IP 100.100.100.100) and not the Tomcat (IP 1.1.1.1).

Should I add http://1.1.1.1/AppName/ to the config? How? I tried it but I get a blank page, however this one shows on the URL bar of the browser the internal IP of the Tomcat, so, no go.

Help is appreciated.

Thanks.

EDIT: This is the dump from Wireshark:

GET /AppName/ HTTP/1.1
Host: 100.100.100.100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2012 09:08:51 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 1
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
tomcat apache-2.2 reverse-proxy

3 Answers

  1. I suspect you forgot "ProxyPreserveHost On".

    Without this directive, your app is contacted with the HTTP "Host: 1.1.1.1" header, while when you were browsing directly it would see "Host: the.domain.com".

    • 1

  2. Adding it like this should work just fine:

    <VirtualHost 100.100.100.100:80>
    ProxyPass /AppName/ http://1.1.1.1/AppName/
    ProxyPassReverse /AppName/ http://1.1.1.1/AppName/
</VirtualHost>

    Or even:

    <VirtualHost 100.100.100.100:80>
    ProxyPass /AppName/summary.html http://1.1.1.1/AppName/summary.html
    ProxyPassReverse /AppName/summary.html http://1.1.1.1/AppName/summary.html
    ProxyPass /AppName/App http://1.1.1.1/AppName/App
    ProxyPassReverse /AppName/App http://1.1.1.1/AppName/App
</VirtualHost>

    Can you clarify what issue occurs when you have a config like this in place? I'm not quite sure what you mean by "this one shows on the URL bar of the browser the internal IP of the Tomcat".

    • 0

  3. I would use a rewrite rule instead.

    http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewriterule

    try:

    <VirtualHost 100.100.100.100:80>
    RewriteRule ^/AppName/(.*) http://1.1.1.1/AppName$1 [P]
</VirtualHost>
    • 0