Web Dispatcher behind 3rd party Reverse Proxy

[Former Member]

Hello -

We are being forced by our corporate security to place our web dispatcher servers behind the corporate reverse proxy enviornment. Previously we had these in place to as a sort of proxy for our R/3 and ECC servers. That seemed to work OK with no problems. Now we are being required to place all this infrastructure behind the corporate proxy so that does the first filtering.

So the situation is in fact now that the URL the customers will use is first directed via a virtual URL to the proxy servers which intern back the URL off to the web dispatcher alias. That connection is passing through the reverse proxy server OK but in looking at the logs of the web dispatcher - it doesn't see the requests. When a request is issued to the internal web dispatcher alias which is only available on the internal network because its mounted directly on that machine - it works fine.

Does this relate somehow to the fact the URL for the external connectivity is not directly mounted on the web dispatcher machine but is really a virtual ?

[Former Member]

Hi,

I don't really understand the details of your configuration and so your problem, but I can assure that it should be possible to do what you need.

For an SRM project I had the same security requirements.

So the architecture I set up is :

internet --> Apache Reverse proxy --> SAP Web dispatcher --> SAP SRM

You have to do some specific SAP configuration for Apache to make it work.

Check the SDN wiki for reverse proxies, it is full of very good information.

Regards,

Olivier

[Former Member]

Hi Oliver -

Basically - we have a URL www.proxyURL.com .. which is being passed thought the corporate proxy servers ( I don't know what make or model as they are housed in America - we are in Belgium). The pass the IP address that is associated with www.realURL.com. When we make a direct IE call to www.realURL.com it works just fine when called direct.. but not when we call www.proxyURL.com. I am guessing the proxy server has some sort of wrapper on that call that the traffic doesn't arrive to the web dispatcher somehow.

The question I have is more along the lines - is there anything special that is web dispatcher specific that we have to do when we are trying to funnel a URL thats coming in from the proxy and not physically attached to the server.

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi again,

Yes, most probably, you will have to configure specially the corporate reverse proxy.

That is what is explained in the WIKI and the help.sap.com documentation. Did you read it ? If not, do it, it's a must !

This is not very simple because SAP web applications, generate a lot of dynamic URLs and must "know" that reverse proxies are used.

Understand that it is a project and not not just a 5 minutes configuration...

For example when using Apache as a reverse proxy, you need at least to set :

ProxyPreserveHost on and ProxyPassReverse

You need to decide if you want to rewrite URLS.

You need to manage URL mangling if you use BSP applications in the SAP backend.

In short, you need to know what is the corporate reverse proxy and you need to do a specific SAP configuration both on the corporate reverse proxy and the SAP web dispatcher.

This configuration depends from your specific needs.

Regards,

Olivier