HOW TO: Hosting multiple websites

dbott67 wrote:
Nice how-to... thanks for sharing. Does this still require these steps? http://www.readynas.com/?p=135

No, actually the approach from this Howto is more flexible but requires more work and a lot more knowledge about how things "really work".

dbott67 wrote:
Currently, I've got my blog-thingy hosted on the ReadyNAS Pro. In Frontview, under the HTTP protocol I am redirecting HTTP traffic to the read-only HTTP share "webserver". How does your how-to fit in with this?

Two totally different beasts.
The way you do it will create a config similar to this:

<VirtualHost _default_:80>
  SSLEngine off
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/$ /website [R,L]

  RewriteRule ^/admin/(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}/admin/$1 [R,L]
</VirtualHost>

The important part is line 4 where all requests are redirected to the Share "website". That's what you already noticed here:

dbott67 wrote:
Notice that when you try to go to my site http://home.bott.ca/ in automatically redirects to the webserver share (as I expect it would - http://home.bott.ca/webserver/).

While this works, it will just allow you to host one website on your NAS.
Comes in the Howto. The important part here is that you can have not only one but several <VirtualHost ...> entries.
This leads straight to your next question:

dbott67 wrote:
Do all websites have to be placed within this "webserver" share?

No. Let's have a look at the VirtualHost definition:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  DocumentRoot /path/to/example.com
  <Directory /path/to/example.com>
    Options Indexes
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
  <Location /index.html>
    SetHandler none
    Order Allow,Deny
    Allow from all
  </Location>
  SSLEngine off
</VirtualHost>

Notice line 3. The DocumentRoot ... tells Apache where to look for the files it should serve to the user. In this case this would be /path/to/example.com
Also important is line 2. The ServerName ... tells Apache what site this configuration is meant for.
A simple, yet very abbreviated example:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName server1.dyndns.org
DocumentRoot /website1
(...)
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName anotherserver.dyndns.org
DocumentRoot /website2
(...)
</VirtualHost>

Now what happens when a request comes in is this: Apache will look in the headers for the host name the user wanted to address. Say the user requested "anotherserver.dyndns,org". Apache finds the defintion for that server, looks into the directory /website2 and will serve the file index.html if it's to be found there. (That's an overly simplistic explanation but you should get the drift). /website2 doesn't have to be a share, it just has to exist.
Likewise, since all Apache cares about is the host name, not the IP address, "server1.dyndns.org" and "anotherserver.dyndns.org" may of course point to the same (your public) IP address.

I really hope this was somewhat understandable since I tried to cramp many things in a "not too long to digest" post ;)

-Stefan