Re: patch? (Patch to fix the fatal missing VHost dir)

[Randy Terbush <ra...@zyzzyva.com>]

> > I am also including in this patch a genericized version of my
> > VHostConfigdir patch of old. This change allows you to specify
> > 'ConfigDir' directives which are parsed for '*.conf' files.
> > I've elected to be specific about file extension so that it
> > would still be possible to have non-config files in these 
> > directories, as well as being about to turn off certain files
> > by renaming them.
> 
> This is fine, but refresh my memory - are srm.conf, httpd.conf, and 
> access.conf all complete opaque as to where directives can go?

Yes. To the best of my knowledge. I've been running with 1 config file
for quite some time, with exception of the separate VirtualHost files
that are stuffed in a sub-directory.

> I.e., is 
> there a qualitative difference between the resource config file and the 
> server config file and/or the access config files, or could I put 
> absolutely everything in httpd.conf?  I think this is the case, but if 
> not, then doesn't ConfigDir need some knowlege of what type of config 
> files it'll find there?

ConfigDir should allow you to make your config setup more modular.
My intent is to be able to output and maintain separate VHost config
files from a config editor. Separating into separate files makes life
more simple.

> It might also be nice to make sure a situation like the following doesn't 
> happen - I have a main httpd.conf and a bunch of sub-conf files which 
> each do configuration for one virtualhost, and then I set ownerships and 
> permissions for each of those so that separate people are editing them.  
> I obviously don't want one of the vhost-conf maintainers to be able to 
> set the User directive.  Although, I suppose all this (even the ConfigDir 
> functionality) could be solved using Perl scripts that run once rather 
> than putting the functionality deep inside the server...

After past comments from Alexei, I made this more generic which probably
makes what you describe even more of an issue. I agree with Alexei's 
suggestion. I think, as you point out, that building a .conf file from
your users subdirs is probably safest from your point of view.

Re: patch? (Patch to fix the fatal missing VHost dir)

[Alexei Kosut <ak...@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>]

On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Randy Terbush wrote:

> After past comments from Alexei, I made this more generic which probably
> makes what you describe even more of an issue. I agree with Alexei's 
> suggestion. I think, as you point out, that building a .conf file from
> your users subdirs is probably safest from your point of view.

I agree. For one thing, unless you're running the server from inetd,
the users are going to need some way to send a SIGHUP to the server
so it rereads the config file. I ran into this problem a couple months
ago. While it's not hard to write a setuid program to do this, it's
less intuitive than it might be. (although Apache's config files
aren't neccessarily intuitive to begin with)

Random feature thought: a feature to let Apache "watch" config files,
and when they change, reread them automatically. Of course, this
entails better error handling than we have now. Any situation where
non-admin people can edit raw config files gets ugly, since Apache
dies if it reads an invalid config entry.

So you may be better off preparsing all your user config files anyway.

-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Alexei Kosut <ak...@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>      The Apache HTTP Server
URL: http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/   http://www.apache.org/
 
      "War does not determine who is right, only who is left."