Re: Virtual Hosting and the FHS
On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 07:01:51PM +0200, Peter Makholm wrote:
> > /var/www is out for web, as debian packages expect to be able to put things
> > in there and for them to be visible on the default web site.
>
> I hope no packages does this except the webserver-packagtes placing a
> default index.html if no such file exists.
I can't remember which ones I'm thinking of, but several packages that
do web-related things expect to be able to put bits of themselves in
/var/www.
> If a package just
> overwrites /var/www/index.html it's a serious bug.
They don't/shouldn't "just" do that, but they do add subdirectories, files etc.
into /var/www. If they provide a web front-end to something, where else
are they supposed to go?
> I have used /var/www/{hacking.dk, xyzzy.adsl.dk, peter.makholm.net}/
> for hosting hacking.dk, xyzzy.adsl.dk and peter.makholm.net for some
> time without problem. Am I just lucky?
Probably lucky, but not exceptionally so. Potentially untidy rather than
downright scary in most cases.
However, does your "default" webserver (i.e. the bits of httpd.conf etc. that
do not refer to virtual hosts, in apache's case) still point at /var/www?
If so you may (either now or at some point in the future) accidentally
reveal things which you do not wish to reveal (like sources to cgi scripts
contained within virtual hosts' cgi-bin directories, if you have them).
Even if not, it's ugly and messy.
> Packages which includes cgi-scripts should place them in
> /usr/lib/cgi-bin and html-files should be placed under /usr/share/ and
> registered with doc-base which then makes it vievable throug http.
doc-base is for online manuals & documentation. I'm talking about, for
example, a web-based calendaring package. Unless I'm very mistaken and
the doc-base documentation (and several other things) are horribly broken,
doc-base has no relevance to such things, other than in registering their
*documentation*.
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens tomorrow!
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