You would not believe the clusterfuck this is. Apache is so worried about backwards compatibility that just blowing away what others have done to jury rig their systems to make them work properly is thought as something that would be a nightmare.
Yes, a nightmare it would be, but at some point it has to be done. The problem is that the context of the settings, directives, mods, proxy, etc are so ill documented and are so poorly implemented and there are so many know nothing Joe experts out there that getting a solid understanding of what is actually happening to make this all work just isn’t possible. Not for mortal man that is.
Yeah, many will claim they aren’t mere mortals (the supposed experts) and that you should go to them for aid. We aren’t talking about aid here. We are talking about learning here.
There’s so much garbage in the online “help” posts with so much variation on the solutions it is extremely difficult to get an understanding of what’s truly available (feature-wise) and why we should do something some way for any given set of circumstances, and how it all works.
For instance, proxy pass which redirects to a container or other computer for security purposes or for load balancing is poorly thought out. You know this when the default proxy pass doesn’t pass the IP address of the site’s visitor instead it sends the proxy pass container’s IP. How stupid is that?
Then try getting rsyslog functioning. Though not an Apache issue, the fact that the log files that are default for Apache aren’t sent over to the rsyslog server. Instead you get new log entries in log files with names you don’t recognize. As a result getting fail2ban to work properly isn’t simple. It’s going to take a lot of extra effort. You need to find the log file that has the log entries and maybe even modify your regex expression in the filter to match that so that fail2ban properly recognizes the failed authorization and bans the proper IP.
Then look at .htaccess and look at the site’s configuration files and all the different directives and checks and mods that it is nearly impossible to find out how to get a proper redirect. A missing / on the end of the website url in these config files can send you on a journey to find why you are getting dns errors when you enter the domain.com/<somefile.php>. It is just a nightmare. Entities like Google should be pushing these open source entities to incorporate some of this into the default configuration…for instance, the visitor’s ip address should be sent to the container (or other computer) regardless of the concept of proxy pass. Since others have found out how to get it to work they need to just bite the bullet and incorporate it into the main Apache program.
So, redirects without the https://www. preamble will fail if your proxy redirect <IP> address fails to include the / at the end. Really, do these people not understand that they should look and add that if it is missing so as to avoid throwing DNS error messages that disclose the internal network makeup of the server? It is better that they learn to do for the user and still give users full control with overrides.
OK, so stop using Apache. This isn’t something that everyone has control over and it is a strawman anyway. The guides are pretty bad and the online documentation at the Apache foundation is just terrible. It lacks context and the author’s never review what they write to bring what you are doing into context.
Apache isn’t the only entity lacking in this. Plasma on KDE. I added a plugin for the desktop configuration called “inactive blur”. It apparently installed correctly but when I went to select the inacive blue option it was missing. I had to OK to close the dialog box, then reopen in. Then it was there. When selecting it I got the dialog box for selecting a wallpaper, however that was sized in such a way I couldn’t even see a full thumbnail of any image, which required that I resize the dialog box. Say it isn’t KDE’s fault? This is the fault of the plugin author? No, the KDE team should be looking at this and realizing that it should have minimum sizes when opening where at least one thumbnail picture is fully visible. That means resizing things on their own independent of the plugin author in order to aid the user.
You say this is immaterial in that we all get used to it? No it isn’t. There are enough of these nuisances that we all have being tired. Not just tired of, but tired. It’s hard to keep going on day after day when you get it working properly and the next time you reboot it doesn’t work.