Joe Mocker's Weblog: How'd you know I was blogging at you if you weren't blogging at me?

I've finally gotten around to upgrading my personal website from Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 to 7.0 - as well as a refresh of JSPWiki

As I have been doing the migration, one of the things I ran across was a method I have for forcing a URLs to the SSL/HTTPS port of the web server. For example, I have a WebMail application installed that I occasionally use. The web server is configured to serve both Plain HTTP and SSL HTTP requests. But in this case I don't want to be able to access the WebMail application over plain HTTP. How do I force SJSWS to redirect any plain HTTP requests to the SSL? Its really pretty easy.

This works for both 6.1 and 7.0. All you really do is edit the obj.conf (or with 7.0, it might be node-obj.conf) and add a Client tag to the beginning of the "default" Object of the form:

<Client match="all" security="false">
NameTrans fn="redirect" from="/webmail" url-prefix="https://server.org/webmail"
NameTrans fn="redirect" from="/webmail/*" url-prefix="https://server.org/webmail/"
</Client>

What this is saying is, for any request that is over plain HTTP (security="false") evaluate, the included NameTrans parameters. In this case, any request starting with webmail will be redirected to the SSL port.

The Client tag can perform much more complex evaluations. For example, one thing that can be handy is to limit the evaluation of the inner directives to a specific virtual host. To do that, Simply add a urlhost attribute:

<Client match="all" security="false" urlhost="server.org">
NameTrans fn="redirect" from="/webmail" url-prefix="https://server.org/webmail"
NameTrans fn="redirect" from="/webmail/*" url-prefix="https://server.org/webmail/"
</Client>