Forcing SSL for GroupWise 7 Webaccess on OES / NetWare

Novell Cool Solutions: Tip
By Matt Midson

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Posted: 1 May 2007

Problem

The goal is to force SSL for GroupWise 7 WebAccess on OES / NetWare. There are some articles already written on this topic, but they either did not work, did not work without affecting other web services on the server, or were for Linux, or earlier versions of NetWare or GroupWise.

Solution

Environment

Windows XP
GroupWise 6.5.3

What worked for us was to add modified redirect statements based on TID 3317621 to GWapache2.conf. We also had to enable mod_rewrite in the httpd.conf file, as per the TID.

Rather than using the virtual host directive, which did not appear to work on our configuration, we added modified Rewrite rules to the top of the GWapache2.conf file, before the Tomcat mounts. Also, because these Rewrite Rules are used outside of a virtual host definition, they needed modification to prevent them affecting other services such as iFolder.

Files modified:

SYS:apache2/conf/httpd.conf
SYS:apache2/conf/GWapache2.cong

Example

#
# Root context mounts for Tomcat
#

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/
RewriteRule ^/gw/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/gw/ [L,R]
RewriteRule ^/gw/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/gw/webacc [L,R]

JkMount /*.jsp ajp13
JkMount /gw/* ajp13

Alias /gw "SYS:/tomcat/4/webapps/gw"


# In general, allow access.
<Directory "SYS:/tomcat/4/webapps/gw">
    Options MultiViews
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

<Location "/gw">
    Allow from all
</Location>

# Deny access to the running code.
<Location "/gw/WEB-INF/">
    deny from all
</Location>

# Add default character sets
<Location /gw>
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
</Location>
<Location /gw/gwmonitor>
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
</Location>
<Location /gw/com/*>
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
</Location>

<Directory "SYS:/tomcat/4/webapps/gw/WEB-INF/">
    Order allow,deny
    deny from all
</Directory>

# Deny access to the manifest, etc.
<Location "/gw/META-INF/">
    deny from all
</Location>

<Directory "SYS:/tomcat/4/webapps/gw/META-INF/">
    Order allow,deny
    deny from all
</Directory>

Environment