What am I missing?

[Dave Hull]

On Sun, 4 May 2003, Bradley Miller wrote:

> At 10:32 PM 5/4/2003 -0500, you wrote:
> 
> >Which one was it?
> 
> There was a "main" one clear at the beginning of my httpd.conf file.  No 
> matter what I did do the actual directory, it was set to "none" and killed 
> my .htaccess/passwd file.

If you're the administrator of the web server on this box, you should consider 
leaving things the way they are and set your overrides in the main httpd.conf 
file on a per directory basis, rather than allowing overrides globally.

If you set the main config file to allow overrides globally, it will slow down 
your web server according to Apache's documentation. The reason is that the 
web server will have to search through every directory in the path to the 
document being served checking to see if there are any .htaccess files.

You can simply add a new <Directory>...</Directory> section for the directory 
you want to restrict access to like so:

# First Directory entry for server root
<Directory />
   Options FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride None
</Directory>

# DocumentRoot Directory entry
<Directory "/var/www/html">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
</Directory>

# Restricted Directory
<Directory "/var/www/html/manuals/perl">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   AllowOverride None
   Order deny,allow
   Deny from all
   Allow from 192.168.1.0/24
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName Perl
   AuthUserFile /var/www/hackme.pwd
   AuthGroupFile /dev/null
   Require valid-user
</Directory>

...

Again, according to Apache's docs, doing things this way will speed up the web 
server. Whereas allowing overrides at the DocumentRoot will cause the server 
to check every directory in the path for a .htaccess file.

Good luck.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com

> When you consider that after a mere 10 years of development NT is
> nearly on par (already there in a lot of ways) with a 40 year old
> OS,  who do you think will be functionally superior in another 10
> years?  My money is on Redmond.

A startup that's only let's see...10:40 = 2.25:10...two and a half
years old.

Also, your money is pending litigation by the supreme court.
-- Steve Nordquist, Trollboy Re: Balkanizing Linux, 03/28/00