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Accepted
Rich Bradshaw
Asked: 2013-12-09 03:35:28 +0800 CST

Switch site from one server to another without changing DNS

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I have two identical servers, one with IP address 1.1.1.1 and one with IP address 2.2.2.2.

They both run Ubuntu with Apache 2.4.

I have a domain name. It's A record is set to 1.1.1.1.

I want to be able to quickly change this so that without modifying the DNS, the site is served from 2.2.2.2.

Effectively I want server 1.1.1.1 to be able to say "pass through me, I'll proxy 2.2.2.2 to you seamlessly".

Is this possible/straightforward?

This would be a temporary measure. We can assume that 1.1.1.1 and 2.2.2.2 are permanently on, and have a good network connection between them.

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can definitely tell Apache to reverse-proxy requests to another host.

    Enable the relevant Apache modules. On Debian and Ubuntu, that's something like:

    $ sudo a2enmod proxy
$ sudo a2enmod proxy_http

    Then configure the reverse-proxy in the Apache config on 1.1.1.1. On Debian and Ubuntu, you'll probably want to use a "site" in /etc/sites-available.

    Something like this should work:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
  <Location />
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyPass http://2.2.2.2/
  </Location>
</VirtualHost>

    The full documentation for mod_proxy has more details.

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