ArsDigita Redirecte
Part of the
ArsDigita Server Architecture
This page was last updated on December 19, 1999
What do you do when you need to migrate a service from one server to
another? Use Redirecte. By simply entering information about the old
host, the new host and a description of the service, you can have
Redirecte redirect requests for the old host to either a fixed URL on
the new host or to the requested URL. For example, if you move the
content of foo.arsdigita.com to the server named foo.com, you can use
Redirecte to redirect requests for
http://foo.arsdigita.com/path/to/service.adp?a=b&c=d to
http://foo.com/path/to/service.adp?a=b&c=d. Or if you'd rather, you
can direct all requests for http://foo.arsdigita.com/ to the single URL
http://foo.com/welcome-to-foo-dot-com.html
Redirecte works by retrieving the host field in the incoming request
header and using that to look up the proper redirect target. If the
hostname in the incoming request is blank or if it does not have an
entry in the redirecte list, then the user will be shown a list of
available services as defined in the redirecte list. If that list
contains a single entry, then the user will be automatically
redirected to that target instead of being shown the list.
Installing ArsDigita Redirecte
Redirecte runs on AOLserver 2.x and AOLserver 3.x
- Download
redirecte.tar.gz
and extract the contents into a server's tcl library root.
- If you are using AOLserver 2.x, edit your AOLserver configuration and make sure that this is
set:
[ns/server/server-name]
EnableTclPages=off
- Edit four procs defined in redirecte-defs.tcl:
- redirecte_hosts - Add an entry for each host. An entry looks like this: [list hostname target description].
- hostname: the name of the (old) server
running on the Redirecte host
(e.g. foo.arsdigita.com, bar.arsdigita.com:8000)
- target: the URL (including hostname) on the
new server (e.g. http://foo.com,
http://bar.com:8000/welcome.html). If this is
simply a hostname without a trailing slash, the
incoming request will be appended. For example,
if the target is set to http://foo.com and the
incoming request is for
http://foo.arsdigita.com/get/this.adp?args=Something,
then the browser will be redirected to
http://foo.com/get/this.adp?args=Something.
- description: the text that will appear on the list of servers page for this hostname. This is used for browsers that do not send the host header or for requests to hosts that do not have entries defined.
- redirecte_title - Title for the "list of servers" page
- redirecte_mesg - Message for the "list of servers" page (can be HTML)
- redirecte_foot - Footer for the "list of servers" page (can be HTML)
Known Problems
- There are no known problems with Redirecte.
abe@arsdigita.com and brucek@arsdigita.com