On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 12:18 -0500, Scott wrote: > Tim, > > You said: > found it best to have the default return nothing, and have virtual hosts > for anything that I specifically wanted. > > > What do you mean by this. Are you saying to put hash marks in front of > certain things? Can you please be more specific? I put all my websites into virtual hosts, and left no files for the default one to serve, except for an error message (the default 403 message that says Apache is installed). i.e. The /var/www/html/ directory, where the default files are served from is empty. I don't put my virtual hosts as sub-directories inside there, as that makes it too easy to grab files from another site. I host them from a different parent directory. e.g. /var/www/site1/, /var/www/site2/, and so on. The ability for someone to browse to http://192.168.1.2/site1/ and grab files they shouldn't, is one reason. Access rules can sometimes be worked around that way, if they're applied via URIs rather than filepaths. Another reason is that you can get people accessing your site through more than one address, and that's a caching and bandwidth problem. Some will do it both ways, doubling the traffic, especially if search engines pick you up both ways. Also, because of the latter reason, I use URI rewriting rules on sites that can be addressed in two ways. For instance, if example.com can also be reached at www.example.com, I'd put in a rule that caused accesses for what I consider the wrong one to be rewritten to what I consider the correct one. The following three lines cause accesses to example.com to become accesses to www.example.com: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] The second line matches host queries that "start" with example.com (that's what the ^ carat in front of example means). The [NC] means to be non-case-sensitive. Now anybody accessing the site gets corrected. If they bookmark the site, they should be bookmarking what I consider its address to be. Likewise if they link to it. Since it's done for them, people never wonder whether they should be referring to the site with or without the the www prefix. They'll use the address that's currently showing in their browser, the corrected one. Putting that all together gives you something like: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName www.example.com ServerAlias example UseCanonicalName On ServerAdmin webmaster@xxxxxxxxxxx DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com DirectoryIndex homepage.html default.html index.html ErrorDocument 401 /responses/401.shtml ErrorDocument 403 /responses/403.shtml ErrorDocument 404 /responses/404.shtml ErrorLog logs/example.com-error_log CustomLog logs/example.com-access_log combined XBitHack Full RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] </VirtualHost> I also customise the server error pages to my site. Though, if you're not going to add information to them that's directly providing help for them to use your site, I wouldn't bother. The default ones are multi-lingual. -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
