Single Link, Multihoming Setup

By: Richard Glaser - Revised: 2006-06-07 devin

Setting up Secondary IP addresses on the ASIP server

The second way of configuring the ASIP server for multi domain support is to set up secondary IP addresses at the server, and have the clients' domain names mapped to the secondary addresses. Open Transport 1.3 or later and a PCI-based server is required to support this capability, which is called 'single-link multihoming', 'IP multinode support', or 'IP aliasing.'

This method is needed when clients are using older browsers (such as Mosaic) which may not support HTTP 1.1; in these cases, the domain name the client used in the URL is not passed to the server; only the IP address is. Thus, the ASIP Web Server must use the IP address to determine what home page to send to the client. When using this method, you should use IP addresses, rather than the domain name, in the Multi Domain Settings file.

Verifty Servers IP Address
Verify that the server's primary IP address is static and configured manually. Open the TCP/IP control panel to verify.

Create an "IP Secondary Addresses" file
This will be a plain text file that will contain the information on the secondary IP addresses. This file needs to be saved into the Preferences folder of the System Folder.

Within this file, each line begins with "ip=" followed by a secondary IP address. If the subnet mask and router address are different from those used by the primary IP address, they should be specified also, preceded by "sm=" and "rt=", respectively. Here is an example; note that the first line which begins with a semicolon is a comment.

;ip address subnet mask router address
ip=192.1.1.4 sm=255.255.255.0 rt=192.1.1.1
ip=192.1.1.5 ip=192.1.1.6

Restart the Server and Test
Using a ping utility like MacTCP Watcher (you can locate and download this handy utility from various ftp sites on the Internet), try pinging each of the secondary IP addresses you've set up for the server.