Redirected Domain Problem - html

We have 2 different websites. One is xy.com another is xyz.com. The domain xyz.com is redirected to a folder on xy.com\one
This works fine. Now we want a particular link to be opened (for example, www.xyz.com\abc.html). I am placing this file in xy.com\one\abc.html. But when I enter this url, it takes me to home page, instead of abc.html. Though I can open abc.html, by entering www.xy.com\one\abc.html.
I need to open this file, from link, www.xyz.com\abc.html. How to accomplish this??
Regards,
Rahul Jain

I think the problem is your slashes are reversed. Did you keep your url's near a strong magnet?

If you are using apache you might want to have a look at mod_rewrite. There are similar methods available for other servers.
Would be good to know which environment you are using (web server and server side language) and if you are applying the re-direct rules in a programmatic way or via server configuration.

To give a serious reply, there could be several things wrong in the redirect.
You have to setup a redirect from the old domain to the new, by using a .htaccess on the old domain, changing the DNS records for the domain, or probably some other alternatives. Which of these have you used?
In case of the second option the receiving server (xy.com) has to accept the incoming domain (xyz.com). When I set my DNS records for a domain to go to a certain server, I have to actually setup the server to accept that domain, usually by "parking" it in Cpanel. Some hosts charge per parked domain, which is why they don't accept the incoming traffic automatically.
Depending on the method used, the receiving server has to be told what to do with the request.
So most importantly: HOW did you set up the redirect? Was it a DNS record? Was it a htaccess on the side of xy.com? Any other methods? (sorry, this isn't really an answer either but it was too long for the comments)

Related

Which robots.txt for forwarded subdomain?

In theory I have two subdomains set up in my hosting:
subdomain1.mydomain.com
subdomain2.mydomain.com
subdomain2 has a CNAME record pointing to an external service.
mydomain.com has a robots.txt that allows indexing everything.
subdomain2.mydomain.com has a robots.txt that allows indexing nothing due to the CNAME record.
If I set up a forward from subdomain1.mydomain.com to subdomain2.mydomain.com, which robots.txt would be used if accessing a link to subdomain1.mydomain.com? Does the domain forward work in the same way as a CNAME record when it comes to robots.txt?
This depends on your server setup.
Take the following config, for example:
server {
server_name subdomainA.example.com;
listen 80;
return 302 http://subdomainB.example.com$request_uri;
}
In this case, we're redirecting everything from subdomainA.example.com to subdomainB.example.com. This will include your robots.txt file.
However, if your configuration is set up to only redirect certain parts, your robots.txt file will only be redirected if it's on your list. This would be the case if you were redirecting only, say, /someFolder.
Note that if you don't return a 302 but just use a different root (e.g. subdomainA and subdomainB are different subdomains but serve the same content), your robots.txt content will be determined by the root directory.
So, therefore, if I'm understanding your config correctly, subdomain1 will use the the robots.txt from subdomain2.
The challenge you're running into is you're looking at things from the standpoint of whatever software you're trying to configure, but search engines and other robots only see the document they load from a URL (just like any other user with a web browser would). That is, search engines will try to load http://subdomain1.mydomain.com/robots.txt and http://subdomain2.mydomain.com/robots.txt, and it's up to you (through configuring whatever software your server is running) to ensure that those are in fact serving what you want.
A CNAME is just a way to add a redirection when loading what IP a browser should look at to resolve a domain name. A robot will use it when resolving the name to find out the "real" IP to connect to, but it doesn't have any further bearing on what the GET /robots.txt request does once it connects to the server.
In terms of "forwarding", that term can mean different things, so you'd need to know what a browser or robot would receive when it requested the page. If it's doing a 301 or 302 redirection to send the client to another URL, you'll probably get different results from different search engines on how they may honor that, particularly if it's being redirected to an entirely different domain. I probably would try to avoid it, just because a lot of robots are poorly written. Some search engines have tools to help you determine how their crawlers are reading your robots.txt URLs, such as Google's tool.

HTML: Link to non-http resource on the same server

I am creating a small internet site for my personal stuff. I want to put there a few links to e.g. FTP resources or SVN server.
The important thing is that the FTP server has the same IP address as the page. I don't want to hard-code the address of my site in the link, because I consider this an anti-pattern. Instead, I would like to tell browser that the resource is on the current server, whichever server it is.
Let's say that the current page is https://example.com/stuff/index.html. If I create a tag things, it will lead to https://example.com/things.index.html.
However, if I add a protocol identifier to an URL, it won't work. For example, download will lead to ftp:///files/thingies.tar.gz, not to ftp://example.com/files/thingies.tar.gz.
What magic code should I put in the place of question marks:
download thingies
UPDATE:
I would prefer a client-side solution. My server machine has very low processing power and RAM amount.
In php (server side language code) if you'd like to forward
ftp:///files/thingies.tar.gz
to
ftp://example.com/files/thingies.tar.gz
considering example.com is the domain where your server is hosted, just do
echo 'ftp://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'files/thingies.tar.gz';
or, in your specific case
download thingies

How do I protect a directory within github-pages?

I am building my personal website using Jekyll and hosting it at github-pages. I would like to have a password protected area (just password protected directory, not the whole website). I have tried a few options and tricks to get htaccess to work but failed.
I would like to know if someone managed to use htaccess, or any other method, to protect a directory on github-pages.
Listing solutions which did not work for me (or I failed to get them to work):
*Flohei.
*Jeremy Ricketts.
GitHubPages (like Bitbucket Pages and GitLab Pages) only serve static pages, so the only solution is something client side (Javascript).
A solution could be, instead of using real authentication, just to share only a secret (password) with all the authorized persons and implement one of the following scheme:
put all the private files in a (not listed) subdirectory and name that with the hash of the chosen password. The index page asks you (with Javascript) for the password and build the correct start link calculating the hash.
See for example: https://github.com/matteobrusa/Password-protection-for-static-pages
PRO:
Very simple approach protecting a whole subdirectory tree
CONS:
possible attack: sniffing the following requests to obtain the name of the subdirectory
the admins on the hosting site have access to the full contents
crypt the page with password and decrypt on the fly with javascript
see for example: https://github.com/robinmoisson/staticrypt
PRO: no plaintext page code around (decrypting happens on the client side)
CONS:
just a single page, and need to reinsert the password on every refresh
an admin could change your Javascript code to obtain the password when you insert it
One option is to use Cloudflare Access to control access at the DNS level.
After setting up a custom domain for your Git pages using Cloudflare for DNS, you can use their Access rules policy to require authentication at the specified url path.
This could still be bypassed if someone is familiar with bypassing DNS blocks.
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-access/
You can give a try to Jekyll Auth and if you run into troubles, this issue can be useful.
You can use Render to deploy your static Web app. It has a npm package that encrypted your html files and user can not see it in browser. So you can use frontend password validation.

Website Redirect Alternative - Two URLs to use same code base

Currently I have a redirect setup in my domain host's dns for example2.com to goto example.com
I don't want it to redirect but rather stay as example2.com while displaying the exact content from example.com. I don't want to copy the site's code between the two. I want a single code base and both URL's to use the same code.
I am not sure how to achieve this using my web host's CPanel. I thought I might be able to do it using cnames or aliases but that does not seem to work. I am sure someone has had this experience before.
I believe this is a pseudo-programming question but if a mod decides this is the wrong stack please do move it.
303 headers need to be sent with a new domain or in this case example.com, for apache or php related steps see these links:
http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/htaccess/redirect-without-changing-url
redirect to a page without changing the url
Redirecting to HTTP error documents without changing the request URL
For explanations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#3xx_Redirection

difference between http and www

pardon me for asking a very basic doubt.
I have hosted a page in the site collinfo.annauniv.edu
The page opens fine when i enter the address as http://collinfo.annauniv.edu
But when i gave www.collinfo.annauniv.edu my browser shows 404 error.
What is the difference that http causes here in place of www.
The www. before your domain is actually a subdomain. It's essentially the same thing as help.microsoft.com or orders.amazon.com.
With that in mind, there are a few things that could be happening:
1) Your DNS records do not include the appropriate A Record for the www subdomain.
In this case, you'll need to setup an A record that points to your web site's IP address. If you don't know how to do this, your web host should be able to help.
2) Your server is not configured to handle the www subdomain.
If you're using the apache web server, it needs to be configured to show your web site when the user enters www before your domain. Again, your web host can set this up for you.
It all comes down to a misconfiguration issue. If you don't have experience administering web servers, you may want to give your web host a holler.
www comes from the (rather) old time where a domain had several sub-features, of which the web was not always the main service. For instance
www.domain.tld for web
mail.domain.tld for mail
ftp.domain.tld for ftp
domain.tld for web
but this is a convention - any subdomain may point to anything actually.
This is more a question of DNS declaration and/or web-server configuration ; in this case it is probably that the web-server configuration does not trigger the same pages for www.domain and domain (since you get a 404).
The author / administrator of collinfo.annauniv.edu either forgot to create a DNS entry for www.collinfo.annauniv.edu or did not create a virtual domain (web-server side) for it that would point to the same pages as collinfo.annauniv.edu.
HTTP is a protocol.
http://collinfo.annauniv.edu
Is the address of a resource which can be retrieved using HTTP.
annauniv.edu is the domain in your case.
collinfo is the subdomain.
www.collinfo is also considered as a subdomain but it does not exist. That's why you get HTTP 404 not found.
Subdomain can be anything, www is usually used as it usually mean World Wide Web.
WWW is a subdomain
HTTP is a protocol (language)
Whether you specify HTTP in the browser or not, the browser will always assume the request is being of "http" type and will ussually add http:// for you.
WWW however is just an alternative subdivision of the domain name, the same as in:
www.domain.com
site.domain.com
sub1.domain.com
sub2.domain.com
.....
etc.domain.com
In most cases the WWW subdomain will point to the same "page" as the main domain, which is usually called the "index" page, such as index.html, or index.php and in most cases the index page is hidden in the browser's address bar, unless you specifically type it in, such as http://www.yahoo.com/index.html, but you have to understand that if you have a full control of your webserver you can modify these, so WWW doesn't point to the same page or you can call you main page "home.html" instead of "index.html" and instruct your webserver to "point" your browswer to that page by default.
But things like HTTP are not easily changed, since HTTP is the main language of the web and most browswers use that as the primary means to access the webservers.
Peace!