[gpfsug-discuss] [gpfs][gui] Change document root in server.xml

[Mills, Jonathan B. (GSFC-606.2)[InuTeq, LLC]]

Dear Community,

We have multiple GPFS clusters within our internal networks.  We want to expose more than one GPFS GUI interface, from behind a shared web proxy / firewall setup, which has SAML2 integration with our organization's IDP.  (The SAML2 is not part of the question, it's just a rationale for doing it this way.)  

Essentially, we're trying to do something like https://<fqdn>/gpfs/gui1 and https://<fqdn>/gpfs/gui2

The websphere config in the GPFS GUI packages basically assume a document root of "/".  This poses additional problems when it forms relative URLs...for example, immediately after login, it tries to redirect from "/" to "/gui".  Through our web proxy, this ends up being https://<fqdn>/gui which is a 404.

While problems might be addressable with some complex mod_rewrite in our web proxy, I've been looking for a more straightforward solution. In /opt/ibm/wlp/usr/servers/gpfsgui/server.xml, it's possible to change the document root in line 34:

<webApplication id="GSS_GUI" location="ROOT.war" name="/" />

Changing the document root would allow me to mod_proxy from https://<fqdn>/gpfs/gui1 to https://<internal_rfc1918>/gpfs/gui1, and in theory that makes it easy to support many GPFS GUIs, and should fix the relative URL / redirect issue.

However, while it seems like this ought to simplify matters, in fact it just breaks other parts of the GPFS GUI, because it calls URLs that aren't part of "ROOT.war" and those also assume a document root of "/".

So, my basic question for the community is this:  Has anyone out there successfully mucked with the GPFS GUI document root?  Or am I just barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks in advance,

Jonathan


--
Jonathan Mills / jonathan.mills at nasa.gov
NASA GSFC / NCCS HPC (606.2)
Bldg 28, Rm. S230 / c. 252-412-5710