Hi Will and Jonathan,

Thank you for your replies. I hav implemented the reverse proxy
settings in line with the suggestions below. But the problem persist.
This is the problem. The port number on which biomart runs seems to be
imbedded in all the URLs served by Biomart. Including the url
contained in the initial redirect directive (instructing the browser
to follow the newly created URL containing the session string).
In my setup. I have only port80 open to the outside world, meaning
that URL's having other ports (other than 80) will not fullfilled and
our firewall seems to be configured to silently drop packets destined
to ports other than 80. This is why I seem to get timeouts without
much explanation.

A possible remedy would be to run Biomart on port 80, but this has the
following challenges.
1) Must be run on a seperate server other than the one running httpd
with reverse proxy settings.
2) Apache Httpd is not keen on been run as root (i think it may
require setting of some group and user names in httpd.conf pointed by
the -f argument when starting httpd with a userdefined directory and
httpd.conf file). Linux does not allow non super user accounts from
starting services listening to ports lower than 1024 (I think). This
will require more research to understand how stock httpd does start as
root then runs it's processes as an unprevilaged user.

Allan.






On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Will Spooner <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Allan,
>
> Do you still get problems with the reverse proxy without auth? We run biomart 
> 0.7 like this. Here's what we have in biomart-perl/conf/settings.conf;
>
> [httpdSettings]
> apacheBinary=/usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd
> serverHost=dev.gramene.org
> port=8887
> # to use proxying set the proxy port below (even if its 80) and set 
> serverHost as your proxy host
> proxy=80
> # if apxs or apxs2 is not in default directory where httpd lives, you may set 
> this param to point to apxs/2
> apxs=
> location=biomart
>
> Best,
>
> Will
>
> On 25 Feb 2010, at 08:47, Allan Kamau wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> I am trying to restrict access (by username password) to a dataset
>> accessible via Biomart, is this possible.
>>
>> In the past I did put a httpd server with reverse proxy configured to
>> route calls by url to the correct server port and URL in the internal
>> network, I would then configure the "Location" directive for this url
>> string to use basic authentication. This worked for 0.4 but it seemed
>> quite slow though. Now with Biomart 0.7 the connection via the reverse
>> proxy simply times out.
>>
>> Allan.
>
> --
> William Spooner
> [email protected]
> http://www.eaglegenomics.com
>
>
>
>

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