Re: Domains and HTTP_HOST

Klaus Johannes Rusch (e8726057@student.tuwien.ac.at)
Fri, 8 Nov 1996 23:38:15 CET

In <Pine.LNX.3.95.961107093505.2755A-100000@ns.viet.net>, Benjamin Franz <snowhare@netimages.com> writes:
> > The only assumption here is that the server does NOT run a
> > non-virtual server at the same IP address, i.e. that /document
> > is not a valid URL (except, of course, for the virtual /~document URLs).
>
> This is a *really* bad assumption. Large multi-server sites *routinely*
> use the same local URL path for different servers for ease of
> maintainance. And systems with many independant clients will see
> overlapping name spaces all the time: '/image/' for example.

I did *not* assume multiple virtual servers don't reuse paths, the
only assumption was there is no path that's available both on one or
more of the virtual servers, and the physical server (without a Host:
part).

For clients not supporting Host: the virtual servers are mapped to
directories which do not exist on any virtual server, such as names
prefixed with tilde.

So an HTTP/1.0 request for http://hostname/image/ can always be identified
as being a virtual request, since a request for a subdirectory would be of
the form http://hostname/~client/image/.

Klaus Johannes Rusch

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