Question

Until recently, I had a bunch of virtual sites set up like so:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:1234>
    ...

This works fine for testing on my local machine, where I use a Linux desktop. In order to test how MS and explorer displays my pages from my Windows laptop, I changed this to

<VirtualHost *:1234>
    ...

Which also works fine, calling the site up from http://[mylinuxservername]:1234 on my laptop’s IE. However, I want to restrict that wildcard to the local lan. Plugging in any ip, like 192.nnn.nnn.nnn or 192.*.*.* where the wildcard is above results in 403 Forbidden on the windows machine. The local server still works fine on my Linux box:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:1234 192.*.*.*:1234>
    ...

or

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:1234 192.nnn.nnn.nnn:1234> #exact IP of laptop
    ...

Anyway, I don’t like that wildcard in the second config example above. Hints anyone?

Answer 1

The parameter(s) of VirtualHost are the local addresses you listen to, not the remote ones.

In Apache 2.4 and newer, use the Require directive:

Require ip 127.0.0.0/8
Require ip 192.0.0.0/8

If you are using Apache 2.2 or earlier, use the authz_host configuration:

Order Allow,Deny
Allow from 127.0.0.0/8
Allow from 192.168.0.0/16

This may also work on Apache 2.4, but Order and Allow have been deprecated.