Debian apache woes
Okay. I am completely and utterly at a loss here. I feel as if someone
has stolen my brain because I should not be this stupid. I am, however,
a relative linux fledgling (I have been windows-free for about a year
and a half on the outside, and that's if I take out various pitfalls but
anyway...).
So I'm going to this tiny liberal arts college where I am one of four
people I know who run linux on campus. I shit you not. Most people
"don't want to have to learn computers." So I am a small fish in a tiny
pond, making me one of the most knowledgable people here and this is how
I was selected to admin this student-run webserver which runs Linux. My
co-admin is very slowly learning small commands while she does most of
the HTML and I just, well, geek.
Except I suck at it. I'm running debian potato (I run woody at home but
I wouldn't trust it on a server till it's distributed officially) and
apache 1.3.9. (I know, it is old, but it's the latest version in potato
as far as I can see.)
I'm having the following problems:
1) The worst: Despite having umask 022 in /etc/.profile and everyone's
personal .profiles, newly created directories are randomly getting bad
perms. This is bad because most of my users don't know what the hell
permissions are, having none (except in very limited cases) in windows.
I just taught my two main cronies about chmod 755 and 644 (for regular
web files), but this shit can't keep happening. (For FTPed files, I set
up a umask in the wu-ftpd ftpaccess file to set things at 644 which
seemed to work.)
2) Periodically and randomly people alert me "I can't FTP." This seems
to occassionally clear up or people just tell me "I'm not having a
problem anymore." Since I can FTP fine, and can test the files I put
there via FTP, I really can't see what the problem is for these people.
Are they being stupid? I don't know, because it's now happened to two
different people.
3) After having CGI scripts "forbidden" for a while I finally found the
umpteenth place where I had to put an ExecCGI in the apache config
files and now every CGI script on the page (one for using finger to
return e-mail addresses of people put into the search thing via a second
page frame, and one for a message board) is run and returns "internal
errors." The error in /etc/logs/apache/error.log is that there is a
premature ending of headers.
I am not usually this stupid. Honestly. I run my own machine virtually
error-free. Apache is simply the bane of my fucking existance. Please
give me ANY input you can. I'm going away for a semester and my
co-admin thought this would be fine until everything simultaneously
decided to break this week. :P
Erin
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