Andrew Siwko’s Blog #2

Simple setup for Linux answering machine: http://alpha.greenie.net/vgetty/readme_beginners.html

http://linode.siwko.org/wordpress/?p=244

OK, this was an easy one.  I had two copies of apache running, one with the Red Hat /etc/httpd/conf install and one I compiled into /usr/local/apache2.  SSL was running on the /usr/local copy.  I don’t recall why I did this, but it is likely that I couldn’t do SSL with the Red Hat version.

It was time to add a virtual host and I decided to fix up everything and drag it into one server.  I decided to recompile and move up to the latest httpd (2.0.49).  Here’s the configure script I used:

export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/kerberos/include
time bash configure –prefix=/usr/local/apache-2.0.49 –enable-ssl –enable-proxy –enable-so –disable-ipv6
time make
time make install

When I was trying to get the thing running I had to read some docs because my guesses were a bit off.  To confgure virtual hosts, the argument to NameVirtualHost has to match the attribute to the <VirtualHost> tag which processes it, not the server name.

If the SSLPassPhraseDialog fails, the server can fail with very little warning.  I had to strace the process before I saw that there were errors logged in the ssl log.  It turns out that I had a script returning the passphrase with the wrong security.

So, finally I got everything up and running, I tried both virtual hosts, the proxy through to Tomcat and the SSL virtual host.  From there I went on to SquirrelMail where I found I couldn’t get to my prefs.  I checked the data directory and it’s owned by nobody.  So, here’s the answer:  /usr/local/apache2 was running as user nobody while /etc/httpd was running as apache.  I had set the new server to run as apache while the old one was running as nobody.  The two servers before accessing the data directory as different users caused the original problem.