[Macpartners] Personal Web Sharing under Panther (10.3.2)

[Albert Willis]

On Jan 16, 2004, at 1:34 PM, Carolyn Fuller wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm hosting a web site on my Mac G4 using Personal Web Sharing under  
> Panther (10.3.2) with web pages placed into  
> Library/WebServer/Documents.
>
> I have two problems that I've been told are related:
>
> 1) Library/WebServer/Documents/index.html is not recognized as my home  
> page. But Library/WebServer/Documents/index.html.en is recognized as  
> the home page.


>
> 2) If I click a link from my home page the URL is converted from my IP  
> Address name (fuller.mit.edu) to "fuller.local" which works from any  
> computer on our LAN but breaks from elsewhere.

fuller.local is your Rendezvous name. Anyone on your subnet would be  
able to access the web server without having to configure DNS, etc.  
because Rendezvous allows people to access network services without the  
configuration hassle. In general, having Rendezvous do this is a Good  
Thing.

Someone elsewhere on the internet could access your web site at  
http://fuller.mit.edu/.

>
> I've been told I need to modify my Apache config file to recognize  
> index.html and that this will fix the "local" problem. It will also  
> protect my home page from being overlaid when a new version of Apache  
> is installed!

Whether or not your web site is broadcast via Rendezvous and getting it  
recognize index.html vs. index.html.en are two separate issues. There  
certainly is lots and lots of Apache documentation available; it even  
comes with Mac OS X 10.3--take a look at  
/Library/Documentation/Services/Apache/.

BTW, one way to avoid having your home pages overwritten by Mac OS is  
by serving pages from your home directory--/Users/fuller/Sites/. You  
can then modify httpd.conf (see below) so that when someone access  
fuller.mit.edu, the pages are being served from your home directory.


>
> I think I've found the config file:
>
> System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Apache/ 
> httpd_conf.pm
>
> Is this the right file? If so, what do I modify?

This isn't an Apache configuration file--it's a Perl module that  
modifies the Apache configuration file. It's probably not a good idea  
to change this file unless you know exactly what you're doing.

The main Apache configuration file is /etc/httpd/httpd.conf--even in  
Panther. The Apache web serving series of articles at  
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/collections/webserving.html will  
get you started with how to setup up Apache on Mac OS X (there aren't  
any major changes on how Apache works on Mac OS X 10.2 vs. 10.3).

There's also good a good article at Mac OS X Hints "Smart modification  
of httpd.conf for easier updating" at  
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030628122935391 which  
explains more stuff on safely modifying the httpd.config file.

   -- Al