This page allows you to restrict access to pages on your server by lists DNS hostnames or IP addresses - that is, limit access so that only sites that you want to have access to parts of your server. Address restriction is an easy way to get better control over who is seeing your documents. When a request comes in for a document, the server knows the IP address that the request is coming from. Once it has this address, it uses DNS to look up the hostname that corresponds to that IP address. Then, it checks its address restriction.
The address restriction is done in two steps: first, the server tries to match the incoming host name with the restriction host name. If the client passes, the document is served. If the client fails the test, the server will then check its IP address against the restriction IP addresses. If it passes, the document is served. If it fails, then the server will take appropriate action (as defined below.)
For instance, let's say you have chosen the directory /usr/netsite-docs/info/* as the resource you want to edit. You could specify:
Note that using this specification, you can protect many different things in the same directory with different address restriction for all of them. Simply enter this form again, and enter a different pattern to protect. Now you can enter a wildcard pattern of hosts that you wish to allow. You have the choice of restricting access by hostname, or by IP address. Restricting by hostname is more flexible - if a machine's IP address changes, you won't have to update your server. But on the other hand, restricting by IP address is more reliable - if a DNS lookup fails for a connected client, hostname restriction cannot be used.
If you want to deny all hosts (for instance, if you were hiding your C source files from everyone), you would enter in a hostname restriction of "*~*".
Remember that the hostname and IP addresses should be specified with either a wildcard pattern, or a comma separated list, but not both. Also be sure your wildcard pattern is not recursive - there should only be one level of parentheses in the expression.