[BlueOnyx:10552] Sites with blank host

[Stephanie Sullivan]

Hi,

I have a 5106r server where I needed to make a site without a blank host
field. Foo.com vs www.foo.com. The GUI didn't let me do this. I had to put
something into the host field.

I thought great, turn off url rewriting and make foo.com an alias! Ala (in
the sitexx file):

ServerName www.foo.com
ServerAlias foo.com

Not so good... 

It seems that actual host of the site interacts signifigantly with the SSL
certificate. I created one by hand for foo.com and manually installed it. It
worked great in my forgiving browser, but paypal's IPN processing didn't
work quite right - resulting in a 500 error on the server with a mysterious
malformed headers error and refunds/lost sales.

The site is a wordpress site with a membership system so this is complex to
debug and figure out. What fixed was swapping the server name and alias ala:

ServerName foo.com
ServerAlias www.foo.com

I so despise manually editing a sitexx file. Anytime there is a change that
might cause the sitexx file to be regenerated things break. Not good.

It appears we need the ability to create a virtual host just a domain name
and no host name.

Oh yes, I did look at changing the site to use www.foo.com but there were
too many moving parts and the database was full of internal links without
the www. Really not a viable option.

I'm surprised I had not come across this issue before. Maybe just dumb luck.

That's it, my tale of intrigue and woe for the weekend.

	Thanks,
		-Stephanie