dhis2-users team mailing list archive

[Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gerald

There is a limit to how much nginx can do.

For clients to be able to find the server using a fully qualified domain
name is a network infrastructure issue unrelated to nginx.

As I see it there are 3 approaches which can work:

1.  if the clients (trainee laptops) are connected to the internet proper
then you can make use of a cloud based instance which won't change
regardless of the location of the training.  So for example you already can
have https://sl.dhis2.org/training.  The obvious downside of this is your
training becomes dependent on the internet working always which is a big
risk.

2.  If you are carrying around the training server with you and setting up
a LAN for your trainees and the server then you pretty much control the
infrastructure they will be connecting to.  Presumably the server will have
a private IP address (say 192.168.1.2) on this LAN.  And the client
machines will get IP addresses from a dhcp server which you setup on this
LAN.  What you would need to do is to also setup a DNS server, configure
the dhcp so that clients will be directed to that dns server and create a
host record in that dns server to resolve your chosen name to 192.168.1.2.
 You could set up this dns service on the very same ubuntu based  training
server.  In which case all you would do is to configure the dhcp server
(maybe in the wireless router or whatever it is you are using) to tell
clients to use it.

That is a fairly complex setup, but is what would be required to do what
you want to do.

3.  You can "simulate" the above by mapping the hostname to an ip address
in each of the hosts files on the trainees computers.  I think it is called
LMHOSTS on windows.  This is less hassle than 2 if there are few trainees.

As far as I figure those are your choices. If I was doing a lot of training
with many trainees in many locations I would invest some time and effort
into 2.  If it was occasional and with very few then I might either do 3 or
tell people to connect using the IP address eg. http://192.168.1.2/hmis.

Maybe Matthieu can tell us what they do with the academy training server.
 I'm guessing just use the IP address ..

Regards
Bob



On 3 July 2014 18:21, gerald thomas <gerald17006@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Dear Bob,
> Clearly i am sure i understand what you are saying. Now this is the
> scenario on the ground:
> DPI ask the ICT to do a training server for them, which we had
> completed and information about it had been sent to you.
> Since they will be moving the server to a different location we want
> the localhost to have a name so that way the clients using the server
> only need that name rather than the IP address of the server.
> I was reading and i found out that Nginx can do it. That is my question.
> i want to replay the http://localhost:8080/dhis with maybe http://bob
> for instance.
> Thanks in advance
>
> On 7/3/14, Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi Gerald
> >
> > There are three issues here.  If you already know what i am on about then
> > maybe it will be helpful to others if I explain anyway:
> >
> > 1.  you can't just pick your own ip address unless its for use on an
> > internal network where packets are not being exchanged with the public
> > internet.  So inside a LAN you might use private ips in the 192.168.x.x
> > range or 10.x.x.x.  For anything else you need to get them assigned by
> some
> > party (typically an ISP) which controls a block of them.  So for example
> > Sierra Leone currently has just over 40000 public IP addresses assigned
> to
> > it - controlled by various ISPs.  Its not that many but a big improvement
> > over pre-2012 I guess when there were only 8000 (
> > http://www.nirsoft.net/countryip/sl.html).  So you would typically have
> one
> > or more public IP addresses which get routed to your MOHS router.  Then
> its
> > up to you to do something on your router like reverse NAT or  some other
> > means (port mapping?) to route packets for that ip address to and from
> the
> > actual machine within the network where your nginx (or apache) is
> running.
> >
> > 2.  You also can't just pick any old name.  You need to either first
> > register a domain with a registrar or assign a name to your machine from
> a
> > domain which you already control.  So for example the domain mohs.gov.sl
> > should be under the control of the ministry of health of Sierra Leone (I
> > know its not but it should be).  Then you can just map names like
> > hmis.mohs.gov.sl to addresses like  41.205.224.56 by creating records in
> > the DNS server which is authoriatative for the mohs.gov.sl domain.
> >
> > It could be your IT ministry is controlling gov.sl in which case they
> are
> > the people who can give you control of mohs.gov.sl.
> >
> > 3.  Once your apache or nginx is reachable by its name then you can use
> it
> > to act as a proxy for one or more dhis tomcat servers which are running
> > behind it, either on the same machine or some other machine on your
> > internal network.  So if you have a tomcat running on your machine and
> > listening on port 8080 then, for example, a line like the following in
> your
> > nginx configuration:
> >
> >  location /hmis { proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/hmis; }
> >
> > is going to forward requests for http://hmis.mohs.gov.sl/hmis
> >
> > Bob
> >
> >
> >
> > On 3 July 2014 16:41, gerald thomas <gerald17006@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear All,
> >> I had configure DHIS2 on ubuntu server 12.04 LTS and i had install
> >> Ngnix because i didn't want my clients to using
> >> http://1.1.1.1:8080/dhis on their browsers.
> >> Please what is the necessary configuration i should do if i want to
> >> map that IP to a name for example http or https (http://hmis.org).
> >> Kindly note i am using apache-tomcat.
> >> Please i need an urgent help.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Gerald
> >>
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> >
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Gerald
>