The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Kevin Geraghty <address@concealed>]

My attempt to set up Sympa virtual robots ran into a strange wwsympa
problem: a http request for /wws at any virtual domain(with a domain 
subdirectory in
/home/sympa/etc/, and another in /home/sympa/expl/)  resulted in the
display belonging to the root domain (the one without subdirectories).

This behavior has been reported if robot.conf files are not present in
the virtual domain subdirectories.  Unfortunately, all my virtual
domain subdirectories contained proper robot.conf files.

I traced the problem eventually to a subtle apache config file issue:
in each virtual host section of httpd.conf file, I had:


  ServerName www.<virtual domain name>
  ServerAlias <virtual domain name>

(a common practice). With this configuration, a request to
http://<virtual domain name>/wws behaved improperly, as noted above.

This problem was cured by changing the config to

  ServerName <virtual domain name>
  ServerAlias www.<virtual domain name>


It appears that whenever Apache receives a request to a ServerAlias
host, apache sets the server_name environment variable to ServerName
for that virtual domain, not the ServerAlias that the request came in
on. This is a problem if you have set your sympa robot names to ServerAlias
values, as I had originally.


-- 
Kevin Geraghty