mirroring domains using mod_rewrite

[mcspike]

Hi,

I have a confusing problem.

When I try to mirror/rewrite a site URL to my second domain (residing on a
different server) like:

http://www.mydomain.com/dir/subdir/ rewrite to
http://www.my_second_domain.com/dir/subdir/

it doesnt't want to show http://www.mydomain.com/dir/subdir/ in the address
bar in browser, but shows the mirrored one
http://www.my_second_domain.com/dir/subdir/ instead. Why?

I am using this mod_rewrite:

Rewriterule ^{dir/subdir/(.+)} http://www.my_second_domain.com/dir/subdir/$1
[R,L]

What am I doing wrong and is it even possible for browser to show the URL
that was typed in the address bar when the content is actually being server
off another domain which resides on another server?

If that's not possile, how does one actually mirror one domain to another??

Bostjan Kocan

[[deleted]]

"What am I doing wrong and is it even possible for browser to show the URL
that was typed in the address bar when the content is actually being server
off another domain which resides on another server?"

It's the other way around, you cannot serve content from a different server than the one that the browser is connected to.
ie: you cannot put 'www.here.com' in the location bar, and expect the browser to go to www.there.com' instead.

If you just want to mirror your website, you would leave the domain name alone. A mirror is just a copy of content.

[Anon]

I agree with vincent -
although mod_rewrite rulesets baffle me at the best of times, I believe yours is doing a redirect (don't eat me if I'm wrong though)

There is commercial cloaking software which would do something similar to what you want (though it still uses the remote server, not the mirrored server). To do exactly what you want, you'll want to truly mirror the site by having all the mirrored site's content on the local server, something that can be set to update every evening using cron to be sure the mirror never gets old.