mod_rewrite for Lotus Connections

I’m messing a fair bit with Lotus Connections these days as I’m configuring Lotus Connections 2.0 beta 2 at the office. Lotus Connections 2.0 comes with six features as a new Homepage feature has been added. By default you configure each of the six features with a separate server path that is /activities, /homepage etc. This means that the users have to explicitly state which feature to access from the get-go (e.g. http://lc.example.com/homepage). What I really wanted was for the Homepage feature to display whenever the user surfed to the “base url” (http://lc.example.com).

This is actually quite easy as Websphere uses IBM HTTP Server which is a fork of the standard Apache server. This means that IHS ships with the mod_rewrite module which allows you to do URL rewriting.

The steps are as follows:

1. Edit the conf/httpd.conf file.
2. Enable mod_rewrite by removing the # character in front of
   “LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so”.
3. At the bottom of the file add the following:
   

   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine on
      RewriteLog logs/rewrite_log.log
      RewriteLogLevel 0
      RewriteRule ^/?$ /homepage [PT,L]
   </IfModule>
   

4. Restart IHS.

Easy peasy…