Accessing Horde outside home network

[Michael Harnden]

On Thursday 29 January 2009 11:14:27 am Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
> Quoting Michael Harnden <mike at rochestervball.com>:
> > I recently migrated from an openSUSE 10.1 installation running
> > natively to a OpenPKG installation (v
> > 2.2) on Debian Etch. I use Kolab/Horde as a home email server. Works
> > great for my wife and I who
> > both travel a lot. The migration went smoothly using my backups. My
> > problem lies in accessing Horde
> > from outside of my home network.
> >
> > With my openSUSE installation I could use dyndns.org to access my
> > installation. With the Debian
> > server, once I log in, I am redirected to using my home servers fqdn
> > (home-server.site). Can I
> > correct this on my new installation without creating a huge security
> > hole?
>
> You should be able to correct this without any security problems. I
> assume that your server does not know that it is accessible via the
> dyndns.org fqdn. You can set the server name for horde in
> /kolab/var/kolab/www/horde/config/conf.php.
>
> The relevant line is:
>
> $conf['server']['name'] = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
>
> You should be able to hard-code the server fqdn here. In general it is
> better though if the whole DNS setup is correct and your server is
> able to correctly identify itself. You might also edit /etc/hosts for
> that.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gunnar
>
> > Or am I better off
> > setting up a VPN server (assuming that would work).
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Mike
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Kolab-users mailing list
> > Kolab-users at kolab.org
> > https://kolab.org/mailman/listinfo/kolab-users
Thank you Gunnar, I will take a look at this over the weekend. I received another reply off-list 
which I will post below, that got me up and running for the week. My reply to him bounced, so I'll 
give a public thanks to Jon!
Mike

1. Enable wildcards in your dyndns.org config (so *.mysite.dyndns.org will all 
resolve correctly)

2. Remove or hardcode the redirects in your apache config 
(/kolab/etc/kolab/templates/httpd.conf.template) to either get rid of redirects entirely (which I've 
chosen) or to control exactly where it redirects to (granted, the latter is kludgey)

For my own use, I am fine with typing in https://myserver.mydomain.dyndns.org/horde (or making a 
bookmark to there)...it's only about 7 more characters than I'd have to type otherwise anyway.

The redirects are the "ErrorDocument" lines within the Location blocks in the apache config.  If 
you're new to the apache config file, I'd also highly recommend reading through the apache 
documentation on the web.  It's very thorough, and after reading it I found quite a few other tweaks 
to make to my config, besides removing the redirection.