Muttiple domains served by same application.

[icke]

Apologies for the cross-post from Rails Talk but I am still struggling
a little on this. Here was my OP.

I am building a site that will have several different branded
versions of the same site in order to do some SEO coverage. e.g www.foo.com,
www.foo.co.uk and www.bar.com

There are many discussions on sub-domains but I would like to come up
with a solution to support the following:
1. multiple domains supported as virtual hosts on Apache acting as a
proxy where I anticipate Rewrites to do maintenance pages, pick up
cached pages etc.
2. Use Mongrels as the app server but they will access the same back-
end Rails app running against the same database. [[can a mongrel
server be used to pick up the url and set paths accordingls?
3. pick up the domain from the http header which will be used to
determine which CSS to use, affiliate-id and where to store cached
files from sort of look-up.
4. User only ever sees parameters in the url without any domain-
specific information included i.e. www.foo.co.uk/quote/read not
www.foo.co.uk/foo/quote/read
5. The session data will be domain specific.
6. Ability to over-ride views and some action controller classes by
domain if necessary. [[Rails view paths look to be of help in)

I am a little confused about routes.rb, apache rewrites and some of
the available plug-ins. So for example, where should I parse the http
header?

I would be grateful if someone could let me know if I am thinking
about this in completely the wrong way. If not, are there any good
information sources I should refer to? Should I post this to the
depolyment list?

Thank you.

O.

[icke]

I must be missing something really obvious here. Please could someone
point me in the right direction to a resource explaining this. So far
I have failed to find what I was looking for.

O.