Hi!

I just scratched a bit of an itch. I really wanted to be able to
configure pound to be able to send 301 or 307 redirects, not just
302s. So I wrote a patch to do just that.

It can be applied easily to 2.3.2, but also to 2.4d with 'patch -p1 -F
3' (sorry if this is obvious, see disclaimer below).

You can force a 301 Moved Permanently redirect like this:

        ListenHTTP
            Address 0.0.0.0
            Port    80

            Service
                HeadRequire "Host: .*www.server0.com.*"
                Redirect 301 "http://www.server1.com"
            End
        End

You can force a 302 Found or 307 Temporary Redirect in the same way.

The existing Redirect syntax still works as expected:

        ListenHTTP
            Address 0.0.0.0
            Port    80

            Service
                HeadRequire "Host: .*www.server0.com.*"
                Redirect "http://www.server1.com"
            End
        End

Will use a 302 Found redirect.

Hope it's useful to someone.

Disclaimer: I haven't submitted patches to any project before, but
I've tried to do all the right things.  Apologies in advance if I've
stuffed up, please be kind.


Chris Barnett

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 16:00 +1000, Chris Barnett wrote:[...]

Thanks Chris. I'll have a look at the patches and if reasonable
incorporate them (or at least the idea) in the next release.

May I ask what your motivation is?[...]

Robert,

I've needed something like this for our service.  In our case, our SEO 
(search engine optimization) expert is telling me that google and other 
search engines give pages lower scores if the page appears on multiple 
URLs, even if in the same domain.  So if google sees 
www.somedomain.com/somepage.html and somedomain.com/somepage.html, they 
will give that page a lower score.  With pound I can do a 302 redirect, 
but he wanted a 301, and the only way I could do so is in IIS.  It would 
be better to have it in pound, instead of making a round trip to the 
backend.  At least thats my motivation.

Albert

Robert Segall wrote:[...][...][...]

Hi Robert,

My motivation was pretty simple: my company is putting pound in front of
apache for ease of scaling. Previously our apache configuration was doing
301 redirects, and I wanted to keep it that way. As Albert mentioned, it
could have an effect on SEO, and Google rankings are very important to our
business.

I did some searching on pound and redirects, and found Albert's thread from
December (
http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2006/2006-12/1166484055000),
including Adam's suggested modification. While that would fix the immediate
problem, I saw the real issue as the inability to configure pound to
optionally do 301 redirects.

The ability to handle 307 redirects was added when I read the comments about
them in the source. I figured why not give system admins the ability to
choose for themselves? As long as a sensible default is provided, of course.

So that, combined with a strange desire to do a bit of C hacking (strange
for me) suddenly resulted in a patch, and I thought I might as well submit
it.

BTW, congratulations on such well organized source! I had no trouble finding
or understanding any part of it.

Thanks,

Chris Barnett


On 9/26/07, Albert <pound(at)alacra.com> wrote:[...]