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RewriteEngine on
RewriteLog "/var/log/httpd/rewrite_log"
RewriteLogLevel 9

RewriteRule ^/mailman[/]*$ [mailman.halisp.net...] [L,R]

and commented out:

# RedirectMatch ^/mailman[/]*$ [mailman.halisp.net...]

Which acheived the same results and avoided the looping problem that I created by trying to mix the two approaches without really understanding what I was doing.

Now what I have discovered is that, because mailman.domain.tld is not configured as a virtual host and therefore does not have a document root and therefore cannot possess an index.html file, the default welcome.conf is trapping calls to mailman.domain.tld and rewriting the HTTP_HOST to the full canonical name of the server. This prevents this syntax from working:

# RewriteCond %(HTTP_HOST) ^mailman\.(.*)\.(..+)\.(..+)(\?)$ [NC]
# RewriteRule - [mailman.domain.tld...] [L,R]

What I need is some way of:

a. Avoiding the welcome.conf trap for this specific url.

b. parsing the original http request containing the unaltered name.

I tried this:

# RewriteCond %(SCRIPT_URI) ^mailman\.(.*)\.(..+)\.(..+)(\?)$ [NC]

This may be of interest to other mailman users so I will post the results here.

The situation is this: A single server with multiple IP addresses and related hostnames acts as a mailman server. Mailman is a mailing list manager with a builtin web archive and subscription management system written in php. As shipped it injects a file called mailman.conf into /etc/httpd/conf.d that uses mod_alias to redirect traffic of the form [host.domain.tld...] to run the php scripts necessary to provide the management and archive service. The RedirectMatch statement used to effect this is:

RedirectMatch ^/mailman[/]*$ [example.com...]

However, this arrangment is awkward in that it requires a URL in the form [host.domain.tld...] to reach the mailman web interface. What is desired is that a URL in the form [mailman.domain.tld...] achive the same result.

Solution. The key to this lies in removing the default mailman.conf file and setting up a virtual host configuration that contains the directives in mailman.conf and provides two rewrite rules specifically tailored to the mailman virtual host. The first directive produces the same effect as the default RedirectMatch in mailman.conf:

RewriteRule ^/mailman[/]*$ [mailman.example.com...] [L,R]

The second provides the identical effect if the user simply uses the host name (mailman.example.com).

RewriteRule ^/$ [mailman.example.com...] [L,R]

The [L,] flag tells the rewrite engine to stop processing with this ruleset. The [,R] tells it to process the redirect without stripping the host part.

The entire virtual host configuration file follows:

<VirtualHost mailman.example.com>
DocumentRoot /var/lib/mailman/archives/public
ServerName mailman.example.com

ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/

<Directory /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/>
AllowOverride None
Options ExecCGI
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /pipermail/ /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/

<Directory /var/lib/mailman/archives/public>
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory "/var/lib/mailman/archives/public">
Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

RewriteEngine on
RewriteLog "/var/log/httpd/rewrite_log"
RewriteLogLevel 0

RewriteRule ^/mailman[/]+$ [mailman.example.com...] [L,R]

RewriteRule ^/$ [mailman.example.com...] [L,R]

</VirtualHost>

Now what I need to do is to find out how one disguises the internal URI so that calls to mailman.example.com only display [mailman.example.com...] in the address bar of the browser and not [mailman.example.com...]

But the essential part is working now.

P.S.