VirtualHost & AOL

I have come across a strange problem. I have configured several domains on my server and they all seem to work well on my local network and from several different ISPs. However, it was recently brought to my attention that when people try to access one of the virtual hosts from an AOL account, they only get the first VirtualHost.

Has anyone heard of this occurring? Can anyone offer advice?

--- Cerbere

Tell them to upgrade to the latest version of AOL browser.

I can't tell every AOL customer to upgrade. Meanwhile, the guy whose site I'm hosting isn't too pleased to see another site come up when people type in his URL.

--- Cerbere

Not to every AOL customer but the ones that are still using very old and outdated browsers that can't communicate with Apache's vhost.
Read here -> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/vhosts/name-based.html to find out the limitation.

Thanks for the tip, FreeBSD. I've been scanning the VH section of the Apache site, looking for any info that seems relevant. I don't know if this relates to my problem, tho. I've had a friend testing the site on his AOL account, and he's running 7.0 on XP.

I'm still confused...

If you think it's NOT a client-side issue, then please zip and attach your httpd.conf here.

This is just a random guess in the dark based on my own experiences with AOL, but...

We're forever getting people who have difficulties logging into the secure sections of our sites because AOL has cached the 401 Auth page on their proxy server (despite our best efforts to block that kind of thing).

Could proxy caching be related to this issue? (ie, AOL looks it up, sees IP# 123.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.html and thinks that it already has that page in the proxy cache?)

All our sites are virtual-hosted off the same IP, and so far we don't have this difficulty (Apache/1.3.22/Red-Hat/Linux 7.1).

OK guys, I owe you big for your help, and bigger since it turns out I was wasting your time.

I went to a friend's to try visiting the site (www.domainX.com) on his AOL account and . . . no problem.

So, I went back to the guy whose site it is (he was the one who told me about the 'problem') and asked him to try it again. I watched him type 'domainX.com' in his browser (without the 'www.'), and apache defaulted to the first domain listed as a VirtualHost. Right away I realized two things I had done wrong.

The first was to rely on his description of the problem without seeing it firsthand. I never knew that he was omitting the 'www.'

The second was something that I was omitting. Now that I have gone back to the httpd.conf and added several lines of:

ServerAlias domainX.com *.domain.com

(one for each VirtualHost) everything works just fine.


Thanks again for all your efforts.

--- Cerbere

Now that you know all AOL users only know point and click and nothing beyond those.