hohner's questions

Is there any way of doing a mod_rewrite from one domain to another, but keeping the browser URL the same throughout? This is what I want:

User enters something like bacon.com and ends up on example.com/bacon, but the browser URL always stays as bacon.com?

I basically want to do a mod_rewrite whilst masking the URL. Sorry for the unimaginative example domains, but it's still only 10am... I've checked lots of other answers, but they always usually involve mod_rewrites on the same domain. They don't deal with the fact that bacon.com is already a ServerAlias of example.com.

I've noticed my web server takes a long time to load pages recently. Using Firebug, I realised it takes around 4s for the DNS lookup:

Connecting: 304ms
Sending: 0ms
Waiting: 3.45s
Receiving: 0ms

I thought that was a long time to wait for a HTTP response. In the command line, I initiated:

telnet localhost 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: {IP Address}

And waited until these next three commands were returned before entering twice. The first command I used was to find out the port number:

lsof -p `pidof telnet`

Then, to find out the process:

netstat -nap | grep {port}

And finally:

strace -o /tmp/output -f -r -s4096 -p {PID}

I then pressed enter on the telnet command to return the request so that it would log in the output file. When the telnet finally returned I had a look at the output file and searched for the longest processes, which were:

6152      12.143817 read(17, "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n", 8000) = 16
6152       0.000178 gettimeofday({1330023713, 143410}, NULL) = 0
6152       0.000169 poll([{fd=17, events=POLLIN}], 1, 60000) = 1 ([{fd=17, revents=POLLIN}])
6152      13.550608 read(17, "Host: 164.177.156.189\r\n", 8000) = 23

Does anybody know why these two processes are taking so long? Is it a DNS lookup issue? What should I do to address the problem?

I've recently deployed a web application to my Linux Redhat server using Capistrano which creates the following directory structure in the site's document root:

/var/www/html/example.com/releases/*
/var/www/html/example.com/current

In order to load the current directory on page load, I changed my httpd.conf so that example.com's DirectoryRoot was set to /var/www/html/example.com/current. The problem is that I want certain directories to be available for browsing which are outside the 'current' directory (phpMyAdmin and Bugzilla). I've tried touching a .htaccess file to /var/www/html/example.com but nothing is created...

What do I need to do in order to access directories which are located outside my DocumentRoot? Should I change the DocumentRoot and use .htaccess to forward the web browser to my current directory, or is there a better approach?

Also, as an unimportant side issue: is it wise to use a specific port for certain services? When I used cPanel, they used :2082 and WHM used :2086. Could I do a similar thing on my server to make the services (phpMyAdmin and Bugzilla) a little more hidden?