[TriLUG] Apache + SSL +Virtual Hosts + Reverse Proxy

Tanner Lovelace clubjuggler at gmail.com
Tue Oct 26 10:18:19 EDT 2004


On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:31:53 -0400, Michael Hrivnak
<mhrivnak at triad.rr.com> wrote:
> Lastly, I'll mention that it was a pain in the ass trying to dig through all
> the different config files that get used.  It's nice that files seem to be
> well-commented, but they don't flow logically or seem to be very well
> organized to my taste.  Is that just a Mandrake thing?  There are:
> 
> /etc/httpd/conf/commonhttpd.conf
> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd2.conf
> /etc/httpd/conf.d/[6 different files]
> /etc/httpd/conf/vhosts/[3 different files]

At one point, because of instabilities with a dynamically linked
mod_perl, apache provided mod_perl as a statically linked
binary.  But, since it can be problematic for that to be the main
apache instance, they ran 2 version of apache in parallel.
The main one, minus mod_perl would run on the standard port 80
and the statically linked mod_perl version would run on port 8000
and be proxied from the main one.  Since most of the configuration
between the two instances was the same, the pulled that out and
put it in commonhttpd.conf.  The specific configurations were put into
httpd.conf and httpd-perl.conf.  

In addition, at this point in time, apache version 2 is immature code 
(compared to apache version 1), but since it's what most people 
should be moving to, many distributions are making both versions 
available but aren't necessarily separating out the configuration 
files as much as they should.  This ties into what you mention
below...
 
> Plus, there are several others that as far as I can tell don't get looked at.
> There is ssl configuration in:
> 
> /etc/httpd/conf/ssl/mod_ssl.conf
> /etc/httpd/conf/ssl/ssl.default-vhost.conf
> /etc/httpd/conf.d/40_mod_ssl.conf
> /etc/httpd/conf.d/41_ssl.default-vhost.conf
> 
> The latter two are looked at, the prior to are not, and no they are not
> symlinked, but yes by default they are identical.  Yikes!

This is because of the two different version of apache (version 1 and 2).
The first two files are for apache 1 and the last two are for apache 2.
Since the configuration files for this module (mod_ssl) haven't changed
between apache versions, they are the same, but since the configuration
path has changed, they are now duplicated.  This would have been a good
thing to cover in the apache class (assuming both versions of apache were
mentioned...)

Cheers,
Tanner



More information about the TriLUG mailing list