Forward Proxy config for iPads for soon to go Live site

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 11:17:09AM -0400, IggyDolby wrote:

> Hi, I'm an nginx newbie and I need to configure it as an externally
> available forward proxy for manually configured iPads running an iOS app to
> test a soon to go Live website.

Just a disclaimer:

Please note that nginx is reverse proxy, it's not forward proxy, 
and it was never designed to be.  While it could be possible to 
configure nginx as a forward proxy, it's unsupported and may have 
problems, including security ones.

> You cannot change host files on an iPad but we can ask our external testers
> to configure the proxy settings manually.
> The old website is still "live" and has the old IP DNS's but we want to use
> the same domain name but pointing to the new IP address.
> I have installed nginx-1.4.2-1.el6.ngx.x86_64.rpm and it's up and running
> but I need some help in how to get the configuration setup.
> I will like to resolve to this domain using the /etc/hosts or any other way
> that I could accomplish it and forward the requests to the new site.
> We cannot switch the DNS yet or assign a new DNS name to this IP as it's all
> ready to go with the original named SSL certs etc

If you already have nginx acting as a proxy for you (presumably 
using proxy_pass with variables and a resolver, if /etc/hosts 
doesn't work for you out of the box), an override of a particular 
hostname can be easily done using an upstream{} block with a given 
name.

http://nginx.org/r/upstream

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html