Re: Debian apache woes
> 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.)
Keep trying. It really does get better.
> 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.)
Randomly getting bad perms? That sounds strange. Is there a pattern to the
permissions? Do the users who get the bad perms always get the same
ones? Do whatever you can to reproduce the problem so that you can see it
happening and not just rely on the users' input. Eliminate as many
variables as you can and often the solution will present itself.
Make sure the file in /etc is named profile, not .profile.
Woud it be possible to consider changing ftp servers? I have used proftpd
and have seen that the configuration process is much easier than wu-ftp.
> 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.
Does the machine have more than one network interface? If so, do an
nslookup and see what your DNS reports back. Check to see if you always
get the same IP address first (assuming more than one) or it reports them
in a different order with each lookup. If the ftp server listens to a
particular IP address, ftp to the IP address and see what haapens.
> 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.
Check the script to make sure that before it sends any output back to the
client that it sends a header first. In Perl, the statement looks like so:
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
The two newlines are essential.
> 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
>
Don't let the pressure get to you. Try to give yourself some
space. Remember that computers are relentlessly logical, even if it's a
logic not obvious at the time. A patient, disciplined approach of
assessing what you know about a problem, reducing it to the simplest
possible form and then proceeding to ask questions and try out different
hypotheses will often lead to the answer. And when it doesn't, then you
have valuable input to post a question to the list.
Murphy's law will never be repealed.
Ernest Johanson
Web Systems Administrator
Fuller Theological Seminary
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