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The Novell iChain internal rewriter is used to rewrite URL references to Web servers into the scheme (HTTPS or HTTP) and host names that are defined by an iChain accelerator.
For example, a company has a Web site with the host name of "internal.web.site.com". iChain provides access to this site through the host name of "mycompany.com". In many of the HTML pages there are HTML references (href=) to "http://internal.web.site.com/file1.html". If a user clicks on this reference and it has not been rewritten to "https://mycompany.com/file1.html", the page will not be found. This is because the administrator does not want "internal.web.site.com" to be in the company-wide DNS table.
The internal rewriter, when turned on, is used to rewrite URLs that contain backend Web server host names (internal.web.site.com) with the iChain accelerator host names (mycompany.com).
The internal rewrite is also used to rewrite the scheme for URL references. For example, a Web page may have a URL of "http://mycompany.com/file1.html". If the accelerator for mycompany.com is using SSL sessions between the browser and iChain, then these URL references must be rewritten to "https://mycompany.com". Otherwise, each link that a user clicks on will bounce from HTTP to HTTP to re-establish a new SSL session.
The internal rewriter in iChain 2.0 can be used only on accelerators that had Secure Exchange enabled. This proved difficult for debugging problems because the data moving over the network was encrypted.
The internal rewriter in iChain 2.1 is enabled for all multi-homed children and multi-homed masters and on accelerators that have Secure Exchange enabled. This allows administrators to test the rewriting features over a clear (non-SSL) HTTP connection.
By default, the internal rewriter will not rewrite all URL references. The internal rewriter will try to rewrite all URL references that follow "href=" and "src=" within valid HTML syntax. The internal rewriter will also rewrite some URL references within the HTTP header (specifically, the "Set-Cookie" and "Location" tags).
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