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.
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:
Owner's user name. This is the user who will be in charge of this virtual server. Obviously, you need to create the user account before you can assign it to a web server.
Once you've created the virtual web server, the owner will be able to control this web server from the normal User web configuration page.
All IP addresses must be valid Internet addresses obtained from your ISP if you want the site to be reachable from the Internet. For strictly internal virtual sites, you can make up an address provided it is on the same network as the rest of your internal hosts.
Server name. This is the Internet domain name for the server. Usually, when people go to a web site, they prefer to use a real name rather than an IP address. A possible virtual server name might be sales.rebel.com.
Note that you need to set up this name in the domain name system (DNS); in some cases, this can be done by editing options on the DNS Configuration page.
Admin e-mail. This is the e-mail address of the virtual server's administrator. Usually this address isn't a real person, but instead is an e-mail alias like webmaster@rebel.com. To create a NetWinder e-mail alias, see the section on the SMTP (E-mail Delivery) Server in the Configuring Network Services chapter.
Note: if the web server has errors, they will be e-mailed to the administrator. You should make certain that this is a valid e-mail address.
CGI execution. CGI is the internet common gateway interface. It allows the web server to run a special program (which you provide) to generate web pages, instead of always serving static (unchanging) pages. For example, the NetWinder uses CGI to automatically generate the tables and forms you see in the NetWinder web-based configuration system.
CGI is an advanced topic that is discussed in many places on the internet, but writing CGI scripts is be-yond the scope of this manual.
If you won't be using CGI scripts on this virtual web server, you should disable CGI execution.
Server-side includes. Also known as SSI, Server-side includes are an alternative to CGI that allow the web server to generate partly static, partly dynamic HTML content. As with CGI, SSI is an advanced topic that is beyond the scope of this manual.
To allow the server to use SSI, choose either No-Exec or Full for this option. NoExec allows all SSI features except those that execute external pro-grams. Full adds the ability to execute external pro-grams in a similar way to CGI.
Host type. It isn't absolutely necessary in all cases to give each virtual server its own unique IP address. If only HTTP/1.1-compliant web browsers (including Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x and 5.x) will be used to access your virtual server, you can use a Name-based host that shares the same IP address as your main NetWinder web server. It still needs a unique Server name, though.
We recommend that you avoid Name-based servers, however, and use IP-based servers whenever possible. This is to support people with older or un-common browsers that don't support HTTP/1.1; Name-based virtual hosts don't work with those browsers.
If you don't have many IP addresses available to use for virtual servers, you may be forced to use name-based virtual servers.
DNS. The NetWinder knows how to automatically link the virtual host name to its IP address in its Domain Name Server (DNS). If the NetWinder will be the DNS server for your virtual domain, you should set this option to Primary. If, on the other hand, you want a different server to be the DNS for your virtual host, you should set this option to Off and notify the administrator of the external DNS server.
When you have finished entering all the data, click the Save button to initialize your virtual web server.