Chapter 8
Virtual Hosts

Table of Contents
Virtual Web Servers
Virtual FTP Servers

Your NetWinder allows you to create Virtual Hosts, which you can think of as servers inside of a server. You can assign your NetWinder more than one internet address. For example, two virtual servers addressed server1.rebel.com and server2.rebel.com. may coexist on the same NetWinder but direct users to different information on that server. To the user, the two "virtual" servers look totally different.

This is similar to a company having one telephone number but many different voice mail boxes.

A virtual web server works in much the same way. If someone asks for sales.rebel.com, they might see the sales home page; if they ask for support.rebel.com, they might see the technical support page. But really, it's all running on the same physical server.

On a NetWinder, virtual servers provide another useful feature: a different user maintains each virtual host. So someone in the sales department can update sales.rebel.com, while someone in technical support can keep track of support.rebel.com.

Virtual Web Servers

A web server is the most common kind of virtual host. If you click Virtual Web on the Hosts administration page, you will see this page:

Let's assume you don't have any virtual web servers yet. In that case, you will want to click on Add a new host. You'll see a page that looks like this:

You need to fill in each of the following configuration options:

When you have finished entering all the data, click the Save button to initialize your virtual web server.