I recently came to realize that our website situation was growing out of hand. We had a corporate website, an intranet site, and even a site for web access to email. All of these sites were scattered across multiple servers and each was on a unique port. While this worked, it was not simple. Each new site had to have a new rule configured in the firewall, and who wants the hassle of putting port number at the end of a url?
The solution to this mess turned out to be adding a reverse proxy to our network. By simply providing different urls (www.example.com, mail.example.com) the incomming traffic can be anlayzed by the proxy server and routed to the appropriate internal web server. All the incomming traffic is sent over the default port 80 so the end user never sees any difference. That’s exactly what I wanted, great!
Since our sites are all built upon ASP.NET and hosted on IIS6 the natural option for this was Microsoft ISA Server. Unfortunately, the $1500 cost was way beyond our small company’s internal IT budget. So it was off to Google for me, and after some searching, it appeared that the open source project Url Rewriter by ManagedFusion[sic] seemed to fit the bill.
Thanks for the great write up John. I hope to be including John’s article in an up coming FAQ wiki on my CodePlex project site in the near future.
I am happy to announce the 3.0 release of the Managed Fusion URL Rewriter & Reverse Proxy. Since my previous release in February I have been working hard on a significant rewrite of the core, that to be honest really needed refactoring if I hoped to extend the rewriter is some interesting ways in the future.
Breaking Change Configuration in the web.config has been reorganized.
Major rewrite to the URL Rewriter to provide better performance and more reliable logging.
Major update to the proxy handler, it is much faster, and provides an exact duplication of headers from the proxied server.
Fixed many issues with the chunked encoding, so you are now able to proxy web based services, such as SVN.
Full rewrite of the rule, condition, and flag handling system to provide better performance and more flexibility for developers.
More extensibility points have been created for developers interested in creating their own handlers for rules, conditions, and flags.
More extensive testing of internal mechanics of the rewriter.
Added thread safety to the Apache rule set refresh.
Added initial support for Microsoft UrlRewriter IIS 7 module, this will provided a starting point for extension of the Microsoft configuration to support proxying and other more advanced Apache features.
I am really blown back about how fast and easy MVC is to develop with. I know the guys at Microsoft do a good job with their .NET coding, but I am really impressed by the forethought they put in to MVC. It builds on top of the standard ASP.NET package, but does it in such a way that makes it lean on top of the already feature-rich (read bloated) ASP.NET Page object. It really doesn’t feel like I have all that baggage anymore.
These are the following links that got me started designing my very first MVC application.
Keep a watch on my blog about for my posts about Unit Testing MVC and using Validators in the Routing table. Also I am currently exploring if it is possible for my URL Rewriter andReverse Proxy to be used in combination with the MVC Routing table. I will keep you informed.
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