hostname based ip routing.

[smileaf]

I was wondering if there is a way to forward ports to differnet Ips based on the hostname from the request.
for example:
hostname1.com:80 -> 192.168.0.1
hostname2.com:80 -> 192.168.0.2
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[msalerno]

Off of the top of my head, I would have to say that you cannot do it with iptables. But somebody will probably tell me that I am wrong.

It looks like you want to setup some virtual web servers. If both ip's are on the same box, then you could just use host headers. If the ip's are on different boxes, then you could use host headers along with apache's proxypass directive, if apache.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_proxy.html

[smileaf]

well what I'd like to setup would not only be for different web servers but also for ssh access directly. so an apache proxy wouldn't exactly be ideal. however this brings in an interesting idea.. what can proxy servers do?
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[Telamon]

You can't do it for ssh, or most protocols. The reason it works for web is that it the web browser sends the hostname it's connecting to in it's request to the web server. The web server then parses this "host header" field, and loads the correct page for that hostname.

Most other protocols only receive the IP address in the header, and don't have redirection support in the protocol even if they did know the hostname, so the hostname trick won't work for them. You have to either use a second IP address, or use alternate ports.

So you could bind two IPs to the external interface of your gateway, or use alternate ports, but that's pretty much it. If you are just wanting to use ssh, alternate ports is the way to go. You can put a line in your ~/.ssh/config file to save the alternate portso you don't have to specify it on the command line. Like this: