[geeks] web server conundrum

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

I have an issue with my web server.

It is Apache running on a QNAP TS-453a.

I have DNS through noip.com, and since my IP address is dynamic, Ibm using
their port 80 redirection service to make it available on the standard port.

So www.website.com gets redirected to <IP ADDRESS>:<PORT NUMBER>

This works fine, but it looks ugly, so I elected to use redirection masking,
which hides the redirection from the user. It also means that CSS files are
being interpreted as text/html.

The reason, as I understand it, is because the client is going to <IP
ADDRESS>:<PORT> because of the redirection, but the code looks at
www.website.com/css/<cssfile>.

Evidently this is considered a security violation, because the hostnames of
included code (the CSS) is not the same as the website (the IP ADDRESS). The
web server handles this by changing the MIME type to a non-code type, which
breaks the css.

This seems like a really silly situation. Web redirection for web servers
sitting on dynamic IP addresses is fairly common, so there must be a
solution.