Reverse proxying is problematic

[Robert Schenck <robschenck416@xxxxxxxxx>]

I know this is a long read...but I really need help, and felt the
best way for anyone to help me remotely is to explain the issues in
their entirety. 

Hello,

I'm trying to set a reverse proxy, but first, some context:

My
office is subscribed to few academic journals. These journals verify
the subscription via IP, such that anyone connected to the internet
through our connection can access the journals. However, some
individuals would like to access the journals away from the office as
well. We have a VPN, but it only connects them to our intranet.
Therefore, we want to create a reverse proxy such that the users with
connect to the VPN, then to our intranet, and then to the proxy server,
and then, ultimately, to the journal at hand. This works because the
proxy server will be within our intranet, which they have access to
through the VPN. So it will look like so:

Client --> VPN --> Our Intranet --> Reverse Proxy --> Journal

Note that I'm an intern and have had very little experience with Apache and networking in general (and Linux!)...so please explain things fully.


I have attempted to follow this guide: http://www.apachetutor.org/admin/reverseproxies

I'm running SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, and have installed apache through
zypper. I installed the mod_proxy_html and mod_xml2enc modules via
compiling. They are fully functional. (mod_proxy_html to rewrite
links). 

In the examples below I'm attempting to reverse proxy both
http://aip.org and http://apl.aip.org. So basically want I want to do
is have anything that is http://aip.org/somepage.html to be
http://proxysrv1/aip/somepage.html and anything that is
http://apl.aip.org to be http://proxysrv1/apl/somepage.html. All of the
content on the page must go through the proxy (note: I know that many
of the links lead to other sub-domains, I will include those as
well...but later, I figured I should get these two working first). Please do not suggest a different server application like Squid, I'm required to use Apache. 

So far, I have the following modifications to the http.conf file:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Include /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/*.conf

ProxyHTMLEnable On
ProxyHTMLExtended On

ProxyHTMLLinks  a               href
ProxyHTMLLinks  area            href
ProxyHTMLLinks  link            href
ProxyHTMLLinks  img             src longdesc usemap
ProxyHTMLLinks  object          classid codebase data usemap

ProxyHTMLLinks  q               cite
ProxyHTMLLinks  blockquote      cite
ProxyHTMLLinks  ins             cite
ProxyHTMLLinks  del             cite
ProxyHTMLLinks  form            action
ProxyHTMLLinks  input           src usemap

ProxyHTMLLinks  head            profile
ProxyHTMLLinks  base            href
ProxyHTMLLinks  script          src for
ProxyHTMLLinks  iframe          src

ProxyHTMLEvents onclick ondblclick onmousedown onmouseup \

                onmouseover onmousemove onmouseout onkeypress \
                onkeydown onkeyup onfocus onblur onload \
                onunload onsubmit onreset onselect onchange

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /aip/ http://aip.org/

ProxyPassReverse /aip/ http://aip.org/
ProxyHTMLURLMap http://www.aip.org http://proxysrv1/aip
ProxyPass /apl/ http://apl.aip.org/

ProxyPassReverse /apl/ http://apl.aip.org/
ProxyHTMLURLMap http://apl.aip.org http://proxysrv1/apl

<Location /aip/>

        ProxyHTMLEnable On
        ProxyHTMLExtended On
        ProxyPassReverse /
        ProxyHTMLURLMap / /
        RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
</Location>

<Location /apl/>

        ProxyHTMLEnable On
        ProxyHTMLExtended On
        ProxyPassreverse /
        ProxyHTMLURLMap / /
        RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
</Location>

ProxyHTMLLogVerbose On

LogLevel Info


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the following modifications to the vhost.conf file:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName proxysrv1
    DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs
    HostnameLookups Off
    UseCanonicalName On
    ServerSignature On
    <Directory "/srv/www/htdocs">
        Options Indexes All
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
        Documentroot /srv/www/htdocs/aip
        Servername proxysrv1/aip
        HostnameLookups Off
        UseCanonicalName On
        ServerSignature On
        <Directory "/srv/www/htdocs/aip">

                Options Indexes All
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>


<VirtualHost *:80>

        Documentroot /srv/www/htdocs/apl
        Servername proxysrv1/apl
        HostnameLookups Off
        UseCanonicalName On
        ServerSignature On
        <Directory "/srv/www/htdocs/apl">

                Options Indexes All
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The mass of issues:

1) http://proxysrv1/aip/ looks like this: http://imgur.com/n6m0L.png

The page source: http://paste.ubuntu.com/333007/

2) http://proxysrv1/apl/ looks like this: http://proxysrv1/apl/

The page source: http://paste.ubuntu.com/333009/

3) I created a virtual host & proxy at http://proxysrv1/apl/, yet links like http://apl.aip.org/about/about_the_journal

redirect to http://proxysrv/about/about_the_journal rather than http://proxysrv/apl/about/about_the_journal

4) All the pages look like crap. I had aip.org working previously, but only if I set its directory to / (so by going to http://proxysrv1/ you went to aip.org/), 

and had no virtual hosts.

5) That's actually all I can think of. But the pages are pretty darn broken. 

Please explain any fixes in a step-by-step process. Again, I'm new to this.