I've currently got a reasonably large site up that i've been asked to make changes to.
Currently To login to this site you need to go to:
www.example.com/folder/loginpage.html
This site is only accessible internally at this time and it is unlikely to ever be accessible externally.
We would like to, however, be able to direct external users to a sub-directory on the site (a 'survey' form) which is located in
www.example.com/folder/subfolder/survey.html
This survey writes its results back to the main application and i believe they are integrated tightly.
We initially tried the idea of using an additional IIS7 box as a reverse proxy however it is quite confusing to me, i'm not very familiar with IIS/ARR and the other features required (i'm mostly familiar with networking). I did try and follow a number of tutorials but didn't get very far. I'd like to avoid it if possible.
How can I, using IIS7 (this site is in ASP.NET) restrict external users from accessing anything other than the survey pages (there are a few included files necessary as well)?
Is it possible to make www.example.com/folder/subfolder/survey.html a 'website' in-itself so that i can publish a URL like survey.example.com externally?
I've come across other examples where access is restricted from specific pages but the root of the site is still accessible
ie
www.eg.com/ is allowed but www.eg.com/admin.aspx is denied. I'd like to the the reverse in effect, and if possible, hide the 'true' url.
Hope someone can help! If using a reverse proxy is possible i'm happy to do it but i'd need detailed instructions.
Thanks for reading,
Much appreciated!
Edit: Sorry all, I'm new to stackoverflow, indeed I've just realised that there are several other sub-communities. Is it more appropriate to ask this in a different community? If so, which one?
Thanks!
Related
Excuse my lack of server architecture knowledge, but I'm a bit confused on what applications, servers, environments, etc.. are and how they can communicate with each other. I just got AWS and here is what I want to do ultimately.
I want to create a Google Chrome extension. For simplicity, lets say that I'm trying to make an app that records the number of times that all users with the extension collectively visit a given webpage plus information about the visits, such as the time they visited and duration. So if I go to Facebook.com and 100 other people with the extension did, I would see an iframe, lets say, that says "100 users have been here and they visited at these times: ...". Of course, the extension also needs to communicate with the server to increase the count by one. The point is, there is no need to visit any webpage for this app to work since it's an extension and the point isn't to go to a webpage, although it still returns HTML and Javascript.
Now, I also want a homepage for the app in case people are interested in the extension for whatever reason. Just like Adblock, you don't need to go to their actual website, but it's good to have one.
My question is, how do I set this up? Do I just have a normal website, ie. www.example.com/ and set it up normally with Wordpress (what I'd like to use) then just designate one address, ie www.example.com/app, to be answered by my Python app? If so, how do I do that? What do I need in AWS? I'm familiar with Flask and have written apps on my local server using it—can that be integrated with Wordpress?
Sorry if this is confusing.
I also want a homepage for the app in case people are interested in
the extension
The simplest is to host the home page as a static website (Html, css, js) in an S3 bucket.
But if you really want WordPress, you can do that too.
For Backend web services for your plugin to talk to, you can use Elastic Beanstalk, it is a very simple way to do that, without tinkering all the components yourself.
Probably a stupid question, or I am the stupid one.
For instance, I have a website http://www.mysite.domain, and another site, let's say a blog http://www.myblog.domain, totally different domain. I fully own both sites, however they are not physically hosted together.
Now I want to map a path of my website blog to the blog, and keep consistency of all further routing without redirect(keep the integrity of the original url) :
http://www.mysite.domain/blog ---> http://www.myblog.domain
http://www.mysite.domain/blog/news ---> http://www.myblog.domain/news
http://www.mysite.domain/blog/aboutme ---> http://www.myblog.domain/aboutme
http://www.mysite.domain/blog/blog?title=whatever ---> http://www.myblog.domain/blog?title=whatever
Is that an evil thought or it is possible?
Given that you have the same sub-domain, this is certainly possible. You would need infrastructure and probably new hardware that routes requests to your domain. There are commercial products (https://www.a10networks.com/products/application-delivery-controllers) that can easily achieve this with some custom scripting. I am not sure about equivalent open source products.
I usually place an app_offline.htm in my root directory when I am releasing a website to a production environment. However sometimes if there has been a few big changes to the site, I would like to click around first to make sure it's stable without allowing access to anyone other than me.
As far as I am aware this isn't possible, but I'm hoping someone has a neat solution...
The solution has to include if someone has a deeplink into the site, so using a default.htm/asp page in the root won't do the trick unfortunately.
I agree with the staging environment answer above, but otherwise here's one possible approach: Temporarily block all IP addresses besides your own. This can be achieved through IIS Directory Security configuration, or programmatically in any number of ways
You can redirect all the non-authorized users to an Under Construction page of some sort. Meanwhile, you can happily browse the site from your IP. When the site is vetted, you remove that IP restriction and the site becomes available to the world at large.
It's a difficult thing to achieve. That's why you should have a staging environment where everything should be validated before shipping into production. Then during the deployment process (if it takes long, but it shouldn't) you could use an App_Offline file. This staging environment should be as close as possible to your production environment (in terms of software, patches and configurations installed, not in terms of hardware power of course).
Another quick suggestion that would allow you to control things from the web.config might include a custom module that redirected all requests to a static page except those defined by a filter (i.e. hostname, url sniffing) that could be configured via the web.config.
Usually when I get the url of a request i use Request.RawUrl.
This gives /default.aspx for example.
However recently my host changed something and now the name of the application directory is displayed as well so i get /appdirname/default.aspx.
Now why does it give me the directory of the application? It looks as if my website is a subapplication of another website. So when you go to mydomain.com the rawurl will be:
/appdirname/default.aspx
I believe each domain has it's own website defined in iis or am i mistaken.
I am not asking for a workaround, which should be pretty straightforward, I am asking why this is happening and how, what kind of IIS setup causes this to happen?
PS.
And the worst part is i had this issue with godaddy and i was happy my host didnt have it but now both hosts have the same problem.
The Request.RawUrl method returns everything after the domain declaration, so if your full url is:
http://www.yourdomain.com:8080/directory/Page.aspx
then the method will return
/directory/Page.aspx
That's all it does. That's all it claims to do. As you say, your hosting provider must have changed something, which is very naughty, and the workaround should be easy. There is a good chance that they have introduced some kind of url redirection, but the best way to find out is to get in touch with their helpdesk and ask them what is happening. I find that most successful hosting companies tend to respond in good time to this kind of question. Otherwise they tend to become formerly-successful hosting companies.
Ric Strahl has this to say about it: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/132081.aspx
Is it possible or feasible to run a bunch off web sites off of only 1 code base?
For example I have 1 site that bases it's connection string off of the domain name or subdomain name. So, depending on what domain/subdomain is hitting the site the site returns content that is stored in a database specifically for that site.
What types of issues might occur from doing this? Specifically if doing this with asp.net.
It's quite acceptable.
Just note that anyone can change the domain name that you may pick up (as long as you've configured a host header for it), so just make sure you don't go around making something like 'admin.foo' but relying only on that for security (you'd be mad though, obviously).
I see no problem with it.
It works and is proven. Se DotNetNuke for just 1 example of this.
Request come in. Regex/character matchthe domain name. Load settings for that domain (base path to images, css, config, pages etc etc) and off you go.
The gotcha to look out for is if your application is both a) storing data in memory and b) using the same application space. So if, for example, you want to dish up two different blogs and you want the data to be resident in memory (if, say, your back-end store was XML and you didn't want to parse XML with every request) then you'll have to make sure that Asp.Net sees each call as a separate application (which can both point to the same file-system folder and thus uses the same files).
I ran into this exact situation when coding a multi-blog data provider for BlogEngine.Net. It uses a single code base to serve up different blogs based on the requested URL. However, since BlogEngine.Net carries its data in memory, the data provider won't work unless IIS is configured so that each blog is its own application.