[TriLUG] Internal http redirect via external web server?

Jon Carnes jonc at haht.com
Fri Jan 25 12:52:05 EST 2002


We have an internal intranet webserver (NT based) that we want folks to be
able to access via our Extranet (Apache cluster running on Linux servers).
Once folks login and authenticate themselves to the Extranet, we want to
give them access to the information stored on the internal intranet
webserver.

 - The internal webserver is not accessible to the outside world
 - The external webcluster is actually a series of machines inside a DMZ
 - Machines in the DMZ can access the internal webserver

We want to click on a URL on the Extranet and have it display a web page
that is on the intranet web server.

I have imagined a cgi running on the external webserver cluster that does an
http get to the intranet, and then displays the information directly to the
user.  The cgi would modify any links that it passes to the user so that
local referenced links would be replaced with a link pointing to the
extranet and the CGI (with the original URL info passed as data).

Thus I would go to:
   http://www.mycompany.com/extranet/intra.cgi

The CGI would get the web page from:
   http://intranet.inside.mycompany.com/

The CGI would then feed my browser the complete contents of the html file
there (index.html), but would modify any URL's in the data stream as
follows:
   http://intranet.inside.mycompany.com/wyxz/abc/defg.html
changed to...
   http://www.mycompany.com/extranet/intra.cgi?wxyz/abc/defg.html

Now when I click on one of the URL's it goes back to the extranet and the
CGI.  The CGI then goes to the intranet webserver and does the same thing
again.  In this way, my information on the intranet server is served up to
users logged in to the extranet server!

This seems like a problem that must have been solved before... Any help or
advice would be greatly appreciated.

Jon Carnes




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