Aliases and Redirects

This section allows you to set up aliases and redirects. A brief explanation of the differences between redirects and aliases is a CSR is a request for a signed certificate you can give to a Certificate Authority to sign. given to avoid confusion.

An Alias allows documents to be stored in the local file system other than the defined document directory. When a user accesses a document through this alias it will appear in their browser as if it was in the aliased directory, keeping the actual directory hidden from the user. This can be useful when you don't want a user to know where they really are or to have links and URL references that have a ``clean'' look. For example if you have files stored in:

/home/httpd/html/updates/december/2000/documentation 

you can alias the address to:

/home/httpd/html/documentation 

allowing you to keep everything organized neatly on your server while keeping the URL short for the user.

For the example given above you would need to type in:

updates/products/december/2000/documentation 

in the From field and type in

documentation

in the To field.

• [NOTE:]When setting up an alias the path is relative to the document path setup in the Web server.

A Redirect maps an old URL into a new one. The new URL is returned to the client which attempts to fetch it again with the new address. The browser is aware of this new address and will be visible to the user in the URL location field in their browser. This could be useful if you wish to point the user to another server. An example of this could be if you are moving a page:

http://www.guardiandigital.com/documentation/october 

to another directory on your web site. In this example we are redirecting documents dated from October to the archives section of the website,

http://www.guardiandigital.com/doc/archives

Using the example given above you would need to type in:

documentation/october

in the From field and

doc/archives

in the To field.

• [NOTE:]As with aliases above, the redirect paths are relative to the URL.

Hopefully you have a clearer understanding between the differences of aliases and redirects. In this section you will see two fields, Document directory aliases and URL redirects.

Document directory aliases

This will allow you to alias a new document root. Enter the directory you want the user to see in the From field and where it will actually be pointing to in the To field.

URL redirects

This will allow you to map one URL on to another. Simply enter in the original URL and where you would like it to point to. The source and destination must both point to valid URLs.