portal access from internet
Hello
I am a newbie as far as jboss server, portals and web applications are concerned. I need some help making a jboss portal accessible from the internet with my own domain (for example www.myTestDomain.de).
Registration and installation:
-> I registered a dynamic host at dyndns.com and a domain at united-domains.de.
-> I installed jboss Server 4.0.3SP1 (default port 8080), mySql 4.1 and the jboss portal 2.2 (binary). With "http://localhost:8080" i can see the startpage of the jboss app-server. With "http://localhost:8080/portal" i can see the startpage of the JBoss portal.
Steps, i tried to make the portal accessible with www.myTestDomain.de:
1) I changed the port for the JBoss app server from 8080 to 80 in the server.xml file in "jboss-home"\server\default\deploy\jbossweb-tomcat55.sar as described in the "Jboss Portal User guide" in chapter 3 (customizing your installation). Now i can see the app-server with "http://localhost" or "www.myTestDomain.de" and the Portal startpage with "http://localhost/portal" or with "www.myTestDomain.de/portal". (I had a similar effect, when i changed the settings in my router instead: Redirecting incoming requests from port 80 to port 8080).
Access from the internet worked, but the user had still to type in "www.myTestDomain.de/portal" to get access to the portal-page.
2) So i tried to change the context path as described in the portal user guide. I downloaded the jboss portal sources instead of the binaries for this task. I changed the following entry in the local.properties file in the build directory:
# Context root for the portal main servlet
portal.web.context-root=/portal --> portal.web.context-root=/somethingother
After redeploying it with "build -d" - as described in another thread - and restarting the server, there was no effect on the context path. It was still "www.myTestDomain.de/portal". I think, i have to learn more about deploying with ant and so on to understand this first.
3) Another idea of me was to use a reverse proxy (did i mention, that i never installed a webserver before): I changed the port of the JBoss App-Server back to its default
8080 again. Then i installed apache 2.0 on windows XP and could see the apache startpage with "http://localhost" (standard port 80) or with "www.myTestDomain.de".
I added the following lines to the apache configuration file "httpd" in the virtual hosts section:
NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName www.myTestDomain.de
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/portal
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/portal
Further i removed the "#" from the lines:
LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
to activate the proxy-modules. But i didn't work as i hoped: when i typed "www.myTestDomain.de" into the browser i got a page, that seemed to be the "JBoss Portal start page" without pictures (only text was visible) and without any working links.
4) This last approach worked: I registered a second domain at united-domains and redirected it at their homepage to "www.myTestDomain.de/portal". Thus i can see my portal.
Of couse i am still interested in the correct, easy and secure !!! way to do this with one domain. I hope, i gave some usefull hints for other newbies.
greetings Christian