Re: your mail

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Fri, 5 May 1995 20:00:36 +0500


On Thu, 4 May 1995 Ramani Iyer wrote:

> I am new to this mailing list and am not sure if this
> has been discussed. But here it goes.
> Is it possible to have 2 different names resolve to
> the same server but point to two different home pages.
> For example : x.y.z should point to page 1 in my sun and
> address http://a.b.c should point to page 2
> in my sun.

You can't do it with DNS. Here's one approach:

From: Rupesh Kapoor <rupesh@altair.shaktiweb.com>

That's not how it works. You have to run two different httpd's (with
different root areas, of course). They would run on diff ports, say one
on 80 (default) and the other on 2000. URL for the first is

http://xyz.com/

and that for the second

http://xyz.com:2000/
or http://abcd.com:2000/

Alternatively, if your computer has multiple network interfaces (or
can be configured to pretend that it does), you can assign one IP
address to abcd.com, assign another to xyz.com, and run a server which
behaves differently depending on which IP address is used to contact
it. The important thing is that the IP addresses must be distinct,
since an HTTP client doesn't try to tell the server what it thinks the
server's name is.

The server you use has to be aware of this arrangement as well, of
course. Patches are available for the NCSA server (and probably for
CERN as well); Apache, an NCSA derivative, comes with this code
integrated in to the main body (and we've even gotten around to
documenting it). See

http://www.hyperreal.com/apache/docs/virtual-host.html

for details on how this works...

rst