[PLUG] httpS vs http

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Sat May 31 13:51:02 UTC 2003


I could be way wrong on this, but I'll give you my understanding.

On Sat, 31 May 2003, James wrote:
> Today I wiped out my Vhost file and started over.. I think I might have
> done something right this time because I am now able to access at least
> one of the virtuals (the main domain name), but ONLY if I use https://
> instead of http://
>
> I know this is because I have an SSL-enabled server port, but I haven't
> had this problem with my other server (probably because it isn't SSL
> enabled) so I am not familiar with this.  Will there be problems for
> people trying to access my virtual servers if they don't type https:// ?
>
> It seems like it should automatically jump to https:// if someone tries to
> visit my site with http://

Your web server is listening on the HTTPS port 443.  If the user's client
requests http, it's going to use the standard port 80.

Run `netstat -an` to see if you have anything at all listening on port 80.
(You can also do `netstat -an|grep :80` or `netstat -a|grep www`... it
really depends on how your ports are aliased in your /etc/services file)

I don't know about Mandrake packages or how they're put together (they're
just RPMs, I know, but I don't know about how those things are distributed
these days), but in Debian there's several different apache packages
including a separate apache-ssl package that is set to listen on port 443.
When I want a domain to have https and http, I run TWO apache servers
(apache-ssl and apache-perl, usually) with the same virtual host
configuration and use redirects on the http server for ssl pages and vice
versa (with some caveats that may or may not matter here).

Anyway, get a listener on port 80 to send attempts at your secure pages to
the secure server.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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