Being in a large corporate environment has positives and negatives, one of those negatives is that many companies use HTTP proxies to control and track internet usage from your work machines. While in most cases this is very important from the HR and workplace productivity side, it can become a headache if you actually need something outside your companies firewalls that is blocked. In my case I wanted to backup some configurations and code to my home machine. To do this I’d generally just rsync over ssh or scp the files over to an off site machine. Sadly with a full firewall up and all traffic required to go through HTTP proxies, I had to find a different solution. In my case, I decided to use ‘corkscrew’.
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I recently switched this server to Lighttpd (using PHP through FastCGI) from Apache. It was easy enough and I ended up with much faster serving websites, unfortunately I hit a snag on one of my sites that extensively uses .htaccess file for rewrites – which Lighttpd does not support. I didn’t want to bail on the whole switch because of a single site, so looked and came up with a simple solution – proxy to Apache through Lighttpd for items on that site (www.350z.ws). In lighttpds config, this was very easy to accomplish:
# Proxy 350z.ws back to apache
$HTTP["host"] =~ "www.3(5|7)0z.ws" {
$HTTP["url"] !~ "(wp-content|wp-includes|css|js|php$|^/blog/$)" {
proxy.server = ( "/" =>
( "localhost" =>
( "host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 81 )
)
)
}
}
Note one (obvious) draw back is that you have to run Apache as well, but since I’m stopping most hits at Lighttpd by serving everything in wp-content, wp-includes, anything with css, js or php in the name, I can greatly reduce the number of Apaches I start and maintain. In my case my Apache prefork config looks like this:
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 3
MinSpareServers 2
MaxSpareServers 5
MaxClients 15
MaxRequestsPerChild 10
</IfModule>
You’ll also notice I’m not proxying the folder where WordPress lives back either, this is because it contains no rewrites for it specifically and will get the majority of the hits.
