I wanted to mention something I just setup at work. The just of this involves the need to support shortnames/searchdomains. This allows a user to type in “bugzilla/” in their browser instead of a FQDN i.e. “bugzilla.example.com”. Of course, the DNS search domain of “example.com” must be configured (either manually or via DHCP).
Enter hdr_beg(host)
Using HAProxy, we can actually do one of three things relating to the host header (there are more, but these are the ones we care about):
hdr_beg(host)- Check the beginning of the host field in the HTTP header for a sting. i.e. wwwhdr_end(host)- Look for a specific string which the host field ends with. i.e. example.comhdr(host)- Compare the entire host field with a string. i.e. bugzilla.example.com
This tells us that we could just use hdr_beg(host) to search for “bugzilla” and respond with our backend, or redirect.
Intelligent Redirection
We generally always redirect permanently around the office. A standard 301 is simple and understood by virtually every HTTP client in existence.
So in HAProxy, under my http *:80 section, I would define a redirect line like this:
redirect location https://bugzilla.example.net code 301 if { hdr_beg(host) -i bugzilla } !{ ssl_fc }
Basically, if the host field in the header [which is always what the user typed into their url bar, minus the uri (/cake.png)] begins with “bugzilla”, then we redirect them to the secure port to continue accessing the site.
A few notes here:
