Redirex 1.0 review

Redirex is a small, lightweight Perl server which intercepts HTTP requests sent to the old address and redirects them to the site's n

License: Freeware File size: 17K Developer: John Walker

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Redirex is a small, lightweight Perl server which intercepts HTTP requests sent to the old address and redirects them to the site's new home. Handy when you change the IP address of a Web server and discover that, months later, requests still rain in from search engines and other sites which have linked to the absolute IP address rather than your site name.

There are few better ways to appreciate the breadth of the Web and the depth of its content as to move a Web server from one machine to another with a different IP address. Whatever the reason motivating the change, you'll quickly discover that requests continue to rain onto the obsolete server, diminishing ever so slowly only as other webmasters discover and correct broken links to your site, and search engines eventually discover the change and re-index your site at its new location. Redirex is a utility which can smooth the transition of a Web site from one server to another, both for users of the site and its administrators. Redirex is a Perl program which receives requests at the address of the old server and responds with HTTP "redirect" (301 status code) replies indicating the new server's name.

To install and configure Redirex, you have to do the following steps:

1. Download the Redirex source archive and extract its contents into a new directory. The archive contains redirex, the main Perl script and redirex.conf, its configuration file.

2. Edit redirex.conf and set the configuration variables appropriately for your application. The configuration variables are discussed in detail below.

3. (Optional) Test Redirex by running it on a user port (for example, 9080), then accessing it from your Web browser with a URL like: "http://my.hostname.net:9080/whatever.html". Verify that the request was redirected as specified by the configuration file.

4. Install Redirex on the old server, configured to listen to the port (usually 80) on which that server used to accept HTTP requests. If the old server no longer exists, configure a different machine to respond to the old server's IP address, perhaps using "IP aliases" or "logical interfaces" to make an existing machine respond to the old server's address. This is discussed in more detail below in the "Virtual Host Setup" section.

5. Verify that Redirex is correctly redirecting requests to the old server and writing log items to the configured file.