Network Alias with Web dispatcher

[Former Member]

What is the best way to do the following.

We want to hide the hostname of the web dispatcher behind a network alias. We have NW 701 webdispatcher in a MS cluster. We use SSL termination.

We would have a network alias such as sapportal.xxx.mycompany.com which would point to the clustered web dispatcher which is called webdispatcherserver.xxx.mycompany.com.

So currently that webdispatcher has a SAPLOCALHOST/SAPLOCALHOSTNAMEFULL pointing to webdispatcherserver and webdispatcherserver.xxx.mycompany.com. And icm/host_name_full is also webdispatcherserver.xxx.mycompany.com. My SSL certificate is in the name of webdispatcherserver.xxx.mycompany.com.

I don't have the alias in place yet, but by putting it in my etc/hosts, i tested and it causes a servier mismatch certificate error since the alias does not match the name in the certificate.

I'm not sure, can i just recreate my webdispatcher PSE for sapportal.xxx.mycompany.com, get a new certificate for that name, or will that not work since saplocalhostfull and icm/host_name_full are a different name?

How does one use an alias?

[Former Member]

If your webdispatcher is pointing to webdispatcherserver.xxx.mycompany.com and you want to resolve sapportal.xxx.mycompany.com you can acheive this at Network Switch level.

Network folks add this entry in their DNS lists and when you call sapportal.xxx.mycompany.com -

---

resolves to -->

webdispatcherserver.xxx.mycompany.com, but this config will give you a certificate error.

To eliminate the cert error in the above screen what you can do is SSL termination at Switch level so that Switch sends only http requests to Webdisp.

The other way is Create a webdisp PSE as sapporta..yourcompany... and import the signed PSE from SSL provider and ,startup webdsip as icm/host_name_full = sapportal... you wont get the cert errors as and this is most widely used

Regards

SM

Edited by: Sri on Apr 12, 2011 4:15 PM

[Former Member]

Hi,

I use Sri's second solution successfully for my SAP portal.

the only difference is that I have set both a short alias (portailsap ) and a long alias (portailsap.domain.company.country)

When my users type http://portailsap the web dispatcher redirects them to https;//portailsap.domain.company.country/irj/portal

So my SSL PSE fot the webdispatcher is set for portailsap.domain.company.country

Regards,

Olivier