Redirecting Your Activation Website

When you use RLM activation, your application contains the URL of the activation server. If you are running the activation server at your own website, it may be fine to hard-code this URL into your software.

However, if you think that there may be a time when you might want to move the website, there are a couple of options you can employ to make this change more easily:

  1. You could create some kind of configuration which your software reads at runtime to decide which URL to use to activate, or

  2. You can use the ISVNAME_ACT_URL environment variable to override the activation URL in the rlm_activate() call (see rlm_activate()), or

  3. You can set up your URL to redirect to a different (presumably newer) URL.

If you use Reprise’s Hosted Activation service, Reprise strongly recommends that you employ one of these techniques. Obviously, the first two techniques are more flexible, because they would allow you to continue operating even if the original URL goes away completely. This is what Reprise Software recommends.

If you wish to redirect your URL, you can do this with an .htaccess file if you are using a Linux server with Apache:

Set up a new domain which you use as your activation URL and redirect the whole domain to the actual activation domain. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Create the domain (usually a subdomain, e.g. activation.yourcompany.com).

  2. In the top-level of the domain, create a .htaccess file with the following contents:

    Options +FollowSymLinks
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteRule (.*) http://actual-activation-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Change actual-activation-domain to your domain name. This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache ModRewrite module enabled.

Note

If you want to redirect just the cgi-bin directory, you will need to remove/comment out the “ScriptAlias” line from your apache conf file (…../apache/conf/httpd.conf).