Re: Apache LDAP - please

[Chris Shenton <cshenton@OutBounderInc.com>]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001 16:32:17 -0600, "Christian Gilmore" <cgilmore@tivoli.com> said:

Christian> Please specify a bit more what you're looking for. You'd
Christian> like to reconfigure apache in real-time with respect to at
Christian> least its virtual host names and document roots based upon
Christian> changing information in an LDAP?

Yeah, basically.

Lets say I'm a web hosting company, an ISP, or even a large corporate
site. I'd have multiple virtual hosts for my clients. My httpd.conf
might look like:

  <VirtualHost *>
  ServerName	www.vdomain-1.com
  DocumentRoot	/usr/local/www/data/www.vdomain-1.com
  CustomLog	/var/log/www.vdomain-1.com combined
  </VirtualHost>

  [lots of hyphothetical VirtualHost definitions]

  <VirtualHost *>
  ServerName	www.vdomain-99.com
  DocumentRoot	/usr/local/www/data/www.vdomain-99.com
  CustomLog	/var/log/www.vdomain-99.com combined
  </VirtualHost>


If I'm running a virtual environment, I'd like to create a client in
some database, preferably an LDAP directory. Apache should then be
able to examine this directory and find out that for domain site
www.vdomain-99.com it should serve up docs from one DocumentRoot,
while for another it should use a different dir.

Ideally it would do this on the fly, in case the LDAP server's data
changed -- maybe the DocumentRoot changed, or some HTTP Redirect was
substituted to it if the customer moved off the server entirely.

On the fly seems a lot harder here than for Auth, since site-to-config
params would have to be looked up for every hit, while Auth only
happens once per authenticating user.

I'm not sure how mail servers like sendmail, postfix, or qmail-ldap
handle the potential delay looking up mail routing info in LDAP.
Perhaps they cache it for a little while, or maybe they just take the
time to do the lookup for every inbound SMTP message and every inbound
POP request.


My goal is to tie in RADIUS dialin authentication/config, Email
routing, Web config, FTP config, and all the other services you'd want
central control over in an ISP or large corporate setting.

Thanks.