On Sat, Mar 02, 2002 at 10:55:55PM -0800, David Walser wrote: > No, not for me it's not that hard to turn on, but I > remember the first time I used Apache, RH 5.2 days. > All I had to do was install it, and it was fully > functional, it was great! I didn't know anything > about web servers at the time, I didn't know it would > be that easy (thought I would have to configure it and > stuff, not that that'd be too bad, I was configuring > samba by hand back then). Now think about a total > newbie. They install Mandrake, and Apache, and it's > not functional. What to do? You even have to find > the options in commonhttpd.conf which isn't even a > standard thing. Sure it wasn't that *hard* for *me* > to do, but it still took a while to figure it out.
You don't even have to touch commonhttpd.conf. echo 'Options Indexes' >> .htaccess Or any of the several other places you can turn it on. At any rate there is tons of documentation. Simple searches of the web would return information on how to do this. Various mailing lists (such as newbie@) could answer this. However, I really don't think most people use this functionality on average anyway. Most people put up index files. And those that don't generally are more sophisticated users that know how to turn it on anyway. The real reason for disabling this is to help protect (but not completly protect) the very newbies that you are trying to help. Many people do foolish things. Like putting their .htpasswd files in webaccessible locations or putting other files they wouldn't intend to have accessible to the web. With Indexes on globally by default these files are there for anyone to browse. Even if you give these files hard to guess names they are advertised as available to view. -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Ghandi
