Solo Technology

As mentioned in a post last week, I’m rolling out some Linux based web servers at work (CentOS to start with). This will allow me to handle the assorted LAMP stack web apps that we use or would like to use in the future (currently WordPress and Joomla!, for example).

Up to this point I’d had them hosted over at Dreamhost in the “budget friendly” shared hosting world. That worked and kept me out of the need to run my own server, but now I want the performance and control that my own servers can offer.

It is paying off already. Since I moved the corporate blog to my first new server it is noticeably faster. Not bad for a modest HP DL320 server (Intel quadcore and 2GB RAM). Granted, it doesn’t consume a lot of traffic. Yet…

Setting up virtual hosts with the Apache web server turned out to be a breeze. I’m very pleasantly surprised at how easy it has been to host many different domains from one server on one IP address. I think I invested all of 5 minutes at the docs to get that rolling.

My next goal is to set this up so that my users have more access to their files — and their files are under their home directory. You know, kind of like how shared hosts do it.

For example, I want the Joomla install to be located at /home/billy/public_html/site.com and not under /var/www/html/site.com. It is billy’s deal and I want him to have access without my having to worry about changing file ownerships and such. In other words, I want the php files to be owned by billy in that example.

To show my ignorance, I think that means I need to go down the suexec rabbit hole… but I’m wondering if I have other options? I’d only ever expect to have just 2 or 3 users with access to this box for web work (and I’d be the only one editing httpd.conf and related files and doing the app installs). Is suexec the only/best option? (and no, I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life typing chown -R apache.apache /var/www/html either!).

Just for grins, I tried adding a new <VirtualHost> stanza and pointed the DocumentRoot over to billy’s stuff, but I keep getting 403 (access denied) errors. Based on experimentation, permissions aren’t the issue so I’m not quite sure how to sort this one out. Nothing useful in the logs.

Perhaps because I’m outside of the DocumentRoot hierarchy? Frustrating. I need to locate an apache guru, I think.

I’m open to ideas, suggestions or contracting pitches at this point. Too tired to keep banging my head on it tonight at any rate.

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