Reverse proxy - percent sign in URL

[jkupski]

I have an Exchange box running OWA that I am front-ending with Apache for security reasons. Everything works fine with one exception: it is not possible to view messages with a % (percent sign) in their subjects.

I have established that this problem only exists when using the proxy, and not when connecting directly to the IIS machine. Looking at my apache and IIS logs, it seems that my problem is Apache converting escaped characters back into ascii before it passes the request to IIS. i.e. the client requests the url "/exchange/user/50%25%20off%20sale.EML" which apache translates as "/exchange/user/50% off sale.EML" and passes to IIS, which ends up with an unescaped percent sign and barfs.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

 

[jkupski]

Gah.

Half an hour of googling and I don't find anything. Thirty seconds after I post the above, I find this:

http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15207

Looks like I either need to build 2.0.55 myself, or wait for RedHat to release it for RHEL4.

 

[blakey2]

Hi Jupski,

I appreciate that you have solved your problem, but would like to pose you a question of my own. - I am about to upgrade the mail server and as such am also going to put OWA behind reverse proxy.

I posted a question in this forum last week but am yet to receive a response:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1117988&page=1

Could you please take five minutes to confirm that you are running this kind of setup, and what hardware you are using for your apache server.

Also pls note, the following link discusses the '%' issue with mod_proxy and has a workaround:

http://3cx.org/item/46

Thankyou - Chris.

 

[jkupski]

That's close enough to what I'm doing (though unfortunately, I cannot use the workaround you posted because I am using ProxyPreserveHost--but thank you for the information!)

The machine I am using to front-end OWA is also serving as an SMTP gateway to do spam and virus checking (postfix/amavis/spamassassin/bitdefenderAV/etc) and also does light webserving (mostly for administrative stuff, such as quarantine management, log analysis, etc.) It's a Dell Poweredge 2850 with a single 2.8GHz Xeon, 1GB of RAM, and a pair of 36GB 15k RPM disks in a RAID1.

Based on your description of your environment, you should have no problem implementing this with a single machine.