During the installation of the secure server packages, if you are
upgrading Apache, you will need to be aware of two issues:
Basically, the DocumentRoot is the directory on
your system which holds most of the Web pages served by your
Apache Web server. The
DocumentRoot is set by a configuration directive in
Apache's configuration file,
httpd.conf. If you are unfamiliar with the
DocumentRoot configuration directive, see the section called DocumentRoot in Chapter 14 for a more detailed
explanation.
Before Red Hat Linux 7.0, the Apache provided with
Red Hat Linux used /home/httpd/html as the
DocumentRoot. In the default (non-secure) version
of Apache's configuration file, the
DocumentRoot is
/usr/local/apache/htdocs. It is also possible
that you (or a predecessor) used an entirely different
DocumentRoot. In Red Hat Linux
7.1, however, the default DocumentRoot is
/var/www/html.
Does this matter to you? It does, if you used
Apache with a different
DocumentRoot, and you want to serve those same Web
pages with your new configuration of
Apache. Any Web pages that were previously
served from a different DocumentRoot will not be
found (or served) by the Apache shipped
with Red Hat Linux 7.1 in its default configuration. You will need to take
one of the following steps:
Move all of the files in your old DocumentRoot
(/home/httpd/html,
/usr/local/apache/htdocs, or wherever) to the new
DocumentRoot (/var/www/html).
or
Edit the Apache configuration file and
change all references to the DocumentRoot back to
the old directory path.
The solution you choose depends upon your system's configuration.
Generally, if you automount /home on your system,
you will not want to have your DocumentRoot in
/home. On the other hand, if you do not have much
space in /var, then you probably will not want your
DocumentRoot in /var. You, or
your system administrator, will have to decide the best solution based
on your system's configuration and your Web server's needs. The
secure Web server's default configuration is intended to address the needs of
most Webmasters. Unfortunately, we cannot configure it for every
individual situation.
If you had another version of Apache
installed and you customized its configuration file or files, the
configuration files will be saved in their directory with an extension
of .rpmsave during the installation of
Apache. If you had another version of
Apache installed but you never altered its
configuration file(s), they will be written over during the
installation of this product.
After installing Apache, you can cut and paste the customizations from
your old Apache configuration file(s) into the newly installed
httpd.conf configuration file for your secure
server. Please note that if you are going to use the
Apache Configuration Tool, you must not
edit httpd.conf by hand. Please see the
Official Red Hat Linux Customization Guide for more information about the
Apache Configuration Tool.
