iTP Secure WebServer System Administrator's Guide (Version 7.0)

Configuring the iTP Secure WebServer
iTP Secure WebServer System Administrator’s Guide—523346-012
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Understanding How URLs Work
Understanding How URLs Work
Objects on your iTP Secure WebServer are accessed by means of Universal Resource
Locators (URLs). A URL is composed of these five elements:
A Web client uses the first three components of a URL (method, host, and port) to
access the correct server. It uses the path component to tell the server which specific
object is being requested. Example 7-3 shows a sample URL.
This URL directs its request to an HTTP server running on host www.widgets.com and
checking for requests on port 8080. The object being requested is a Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) program (home.cgi) located in directory /finance. The query string
is money. CGI programs are discussed in detail in Section 8, Using Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) Programs.
Mapping Requests to Contents
To make the contents on your server available to clients, you must map the object
information in URLs to the actual location of these objects on your server. To
implement this mapping, you specify one or more Filemap directives in your server
configuration file (httpd.config).
Each Filemap directive has two arguments:
Filemap url-prefix dir
where:
url-prefix
specifies the URL prefix to which this Filemap directive applies. For example:
/admin/widgets.
No. URL Component Description
1 Method The transport method to be used to access the server. For
example: http.
2 Host The name of the host machine.
3 Port The port on the host to which the request is to be directed. If no
port number is specified, the default port for the particular
method is assumed (for example, port 80 for HTTP).
4 Path The path name of an object (document, image, file, and so on.)
on the server.
5 Query String Additional query information (optional).
Example 7-3. Sample URL
1 2 3 4 5
http://www.widgets.com:8080/finance/home.cgi?money