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I have a Debian 9 server with two static IPv4 addresses. One of them is public and the other one is in the server's VPN subnet (the machine is running an OpenVPN server).

There is a DNS server in the VPN subnet that handles internal name resolution with an own TLD. So both of these IPs have a domain name associated to them (let's call them public.domain and private.domain).

My Apache2 server has two VirtualHosts, one for each domain. There is a non-indexed subdirectory inside the document root that contains private data. What I want to do is password-protect this subdirectory when called from the public, but not require any authentication when accessed over the VPN address.

This is my public VirtualHost configuration:

<VirtualHost public.domain:443>

    [...]

    <Directory /path/to/private/directory>
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Private Data"
        AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/.htpasswd
        Require valid-user
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

And this is my private VirtualHost configuration:

<VirtualHost private.domain:443>

    [...]

    <Directory /path/to/private/directory>
        AuthType None
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

As it turns out, this configuration is not working properly:

  • When I call the protected directory over public.domain, everything still works fine and I can authenticate normally.
  • When I call it from private.domain I don't get asked for login credentials (which is what I wanted), but get a HTTP 403 Forbidden response (Which is obviously not what I wanted).

It seems like the <Directory> options in the two config files are interfering with each other. What am I doing wrong here? Or is this possible at all?

Many thanks in advance!

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  • 1
    At first blush, I would think Apache would read just the first or last directory directive, however, wrapping them in different virtual hosts is a new twist. I am not sure if what you want can be done this way. It may be you need to use another method, one wrapped in PHP. Cheers!! – closetnoc May 26 '18 at 18:01
1

I just found a solution on my own.

I created two symlinks, both pointing to the desired folder. Then, I used one of them for the public VirtualHost and the other one for the private one. Works perfectly fine, just make sure to add Options FollowSymLinks in the <Directory> directives.

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  • 1
    Funny! I thought about symlinks then said Naaahhhhh... that won't work! I guess I should have spoken up anyway. Sorry. Thanks for sharing a solution. Cheers!! – closetnoc May 26 '18 at 21:02
  • To be honest, I didn't think it was going to work either. I probably just tried it because my main PC runs Windows - the OS where the most stupid solutions you could possibly think of turn out to work best ;) – Sandtler May 27 '18 at 23:02
  • 1
    Freaking Windows! Sometimes you have to run it, but I prefer Linux. I used to maintain windows years ago. It was okay. Just hacky and sometimes the simplest thing they make complicated. Cheers mate!! – closetnoc May 28 '18 at 1:14
  • I would have switches to Linux entirely many years ago if the major games and stuff like Adobe Creative Cloud were supported, just because I find it way more convenient. But that's an entirely different story and would require an own discussion. Cheers! ;) – Sandtler May 28 '18 at 18:05

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