Nortel Networks 212777 Virtual Hosting

Web OS 10.0 Application Guide
380 Chapter 15: Content Intelligent Switching 212777-A, February 2002
Virtual Hosting
Web OS allows individuals and companies to have a presence on the Internet in the form of a
dedicated Web site address. For example, you can have a “www.site-a.com” and “www.site-
b.com” instead of “www.hostsite.com/site-a” and “www.hostsite.com/site-b.”
Service providers, on the other hand, do not want to deplete the pool o f unique IP addresses by
dedicating an individual IP address for each home page they host. By supporting an extension in
HTTP 1.1 to include the host header, W eb OS en ables s ervic e provid ers to create a single virt ual
server IP address to host multiple Web sites per customer, each with their own host name .
NOTE – For SLB, one HTTP header is supported per virtual server.
The following list provides more detail on virtual hosting with configuration information.
nAn HTTP/1.0 request sent to an origin server (not a proxy server) is a partial URL instead
of a full URL.
An example of the request that the origin server would see as follows:
GET /products/180/ HTTP/1.0
User-agent: Mozilla/3.0
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg
The GET request does not include the host name. From the TCP/IP headers, the origin
server knows the requests host name, port number, and protocol.
nWith the extension to HTTP/1.1 to include the HTTP HOST: header, the above request to
retrieve the URL “/www.nortelnetworks.com/ products/180” would look like this:
GET /products/180/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nortelnetworks.com
User-agent: Mozilla/3.0
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg
The Host: header carries the hostname used to generate the IP address of the site.
nBased on the Host: header, the switch will forward the request to servers representing dif-
ferent customers’ Web sites.
nThe network administrator needs to define a domain name as part of the 128 supported
URL strings.
nThe switch performs string matching; that is, the string “nortelnetworks.com” or
“www.nortelnetworks.com” will match “www.nortelnetworks.com.”