Weird redirection behaviour on Apache2 server? - redirect

Question

I've built a new site for our company, whom I recently started working for, and deployed it on a separate subdomain (http://site.mysite.com) to not interfere with some URLs that need to remain on the old subdomain.
The old HTML site (http://www.mysite.co/site) was, for some weird reason, placed inside the public/ folder of a Zend application, as public/site. We want to redirect this site, which used to be available on http://mysite.com/site folder, to our new site at http://site.mysite.com
I've edited the existing .htaccess file, inside the Zend public folder so it looks like such:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
# These four lines are my only alterations to this file...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(apps|site).* [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://site.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]**
RewriteRule ^cart/selectaddress$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}/cart/selectaddress [R,L]
Redirect 301 /photobook-sa http://www.mysite.com/photobooksa/
Redirect 301 /photobook-SA http://www.mysite.com/photobooksa/
Redirect 301 /photobookSA http://www.mysite.com/photobooksa/
RewriteRule ^channel\.html channel\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
php_value session.auto_start 0
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
Header append P3P "CP=\"HONK IDC DSP COR CURa ADMa OUR IND PHY ONL COM STA\""
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
The idea is to trap http://mysite.com/apps/, http://mysite.com/apps/whatever and http://mysite.com/site/ and redirect these all, unconditionally to http://site.mysite.com
The problem is, the redirection only works for /apps and apps/whatever, not for /site. So I discovered the public/site folder, which strangely hosts the company site as a HTML only site, within a Zend project folder structure.
Problem is, when I delete this folder, the whole mysite.com and www.mysite.com domain fails, but for example mysite.com/apps still manages to redirect to site.mysite.com
So I tried editing public/site/index.php to look as follows:
<?php
header('Location: http://site.mysite.com'); exit;
and it works, but only for a few requests, then I get a server error.
I also tried adding a .htaccess inside public/site/.htaccess with the following:
Redirect 301 http://site.mysite.com
which also, works initially, but then fails with a server error after a few requests?
I have no idea what's up, no clue as to why the virtual host is dependant on the public/site folder to work, which not even mentioned in the virtual host setups.
I grepped all the controllers in the Zend application/controllers folder to try and see if I can find anything that remotely mentions this /site folder, but no matches found.
I'm pulling the hair out of my scalp with this strange behaviour, can someone please help?
Also last point, this is an Amason AWS server, which I'm not entirely familiar with, could it be that this server has something funny going on, that's non-standard in terms of Apache configuration, DNS setup or something mysteriously automagic?

Answer 1

We've not been able to resolve this issue, and unable to figure out why our methods work only for a few minutes. I'm suspecting something weird happening with Amazon AWS.
The only way we could fix, was by adding an index.html inside the culprit /site folder, using a small JavaScript snippet to redirect the site from the client side.