tinderbox webui behind a reverse proxy [mod_proxy]?

[Fernan Aguero]

Hi,

I've finally got everything working ... and already completed my first
port build in my tinderborx. Works beautifully, congrats for the great
work!

Now I have a problem trying to make the tinderbox web app visible
behind a reverse proxy.

The tinderbox is running on the build host, which has a private IP
address. The webui is running under apache on this same host,
listening on port 83. At work, I can just point my browser to
http://192.168.10.x:83 and get to my tinderbox. However this host is
not visible from outside world.

Our web server, which is visible to the world,  runs a reverse proxy
(apache + mod_proxy), so I thought I would add a few lines to my web
server config and have the tinderbox be visible to the world as
http://genoma.unsam.edu.ar/tinderbox. This is what I did:

In the proxy:
ProxyPass /tinderbox 192.168.10.x:83
ProxyPassReverse /tinderbox 192.168.10.x:83

In the apache where tinderbox runs:
<VirtualHost *:83>
  DocumentRoot "/scratch/tinderbox"
  ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd-tinderbox-error.log"

  Alias /logs/ "/scratch/tinderbox/logs/"
  Alias /packages/ "/scratch/tinderbox/packages/"
  Alias /errors/ "/scratch/tinderbox/errors/"
  Alias / /scratch/tinderbox/scripts/webui/
  <Directory "/scratch/tinderbox">
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

The configuration kind of works ... but the browser takes a long time
to finish loading the page, and when it finishes it shows a basic HTML
page that looks like missing the CSS styling. Also, when opening the
home page, all the links are correct, except the one for the 'Package
directory' associated with the completed build. Strangely enough, if
you stop your browser while it's loading the page (i.e. a few seconds
after the initial request) it would render the page content is there
already

A couple of things make me thing that perhaps the tinderbox php webapp
might be interferring with this:

1) everything works fine from the internal network or from home, using
an SSH tunnel to the apache listening at port 83 in the build host.
But things get slow when accesing the site through the reverse proxy
... there are many other services running through the proxy server,
and they're all working fine ...

2) I have noticed that, although I access the
genoma.unsam.edu.ar/tinderbox URL only once, the proxy logs show a
first request for /tinderbox from my browser's IP address, and then
two more requests for '/' from the same IP address that I never did
... it seems like the page is requesting these.

Then I noticed that within the HTML source for the page, all links are
relative, except for the ones for the CSS spreadsheet and the
/packages/ directory link. These have a hardcoded host address in the
URL, however this address is not the one I entered in tinderbox.ph
when configuring the webui (BTW it really does not seem to matter what
I enter here ... it seems like it does matter what I enter in
inc_tinderbox.php ). When accessing the site through the proxy, this
address is the internal IP address of the tinderbox host, when
accessing the site through an SSH tunnel this address is the
localhost:port address of the tunnel at the browser's side.

To me it's now clear that the proxy configuration is not the problem
... the issue is that some tinderbox URIs work fine through the proxy,
but some don't (becasue they have a hardcoded host address). The
problem is that editing tinderbox.ph does not seem to help. On the
other hand editing inc_tinderbox.php (which does seem to affect these
hardcoded URLs) breaks the tinderbox webui

Anyone got tinderbox to run behind a reverse proxy? Is it working?
Thanks for any tip or suggestion on how to fix it ...

You can check my tinderbox at http://genoma.unsam.edu.ar/tinderbox,

Thanks in advance,

-- 
fernan