Replying to Alan, Scott wrote...
>you need to be root to start it.
>
>use sudo
>
>sudo apachectl start
Which nicely explains the message that Alan saw:
httpd: could not open error log file /private/var/log/httpd/error_log
httpd starts up with root privileges, opens the log files, which are
writeable only by root, and in a directory only writeable by root: hence
Alan's inability to make anything in there via an *administrator* account in
MacOS X. [An administrator account in MacOS X is not equivalent to a root
account, but I believe that such a user is thrown into the /etc/sudoers file
with full access by default. So you're about four letters short of root.]
Anyway, getting back to the miserably small point of this overly long
paragraph: after opening the log files apache forks a number of times, and
the uid of the children is changed from root to www (or nobody on some
systems?). These low-privilege babies do all of the accepting/processing of
connections etc. The nice bit is that they inherit the open file descriptors
from the mega-powerful parent, and hence can write to "root only" log files.
But that's the only rootly power they command.
>as far as the 127.0.0.1
>
>you don't have a hostname set for the unix side of things.. Apple hasn't
>made this easy, you need to edit /etc/hostconfig and set the hostname
Yep, hit this one while trying to use sendmail, which refused to run while
only finding "localhost" as hostname. While I added in the fully qualified
version of my hostname I'm not sure that this was needed/correct. Does
/etc/hostconfig want "osx" or "osx.maths.adelaide.edu.au"? The latter seems
to work fine, but it's somewhat unheimlich seeing the fully qualified name
come up in response to a hostname query. (In case anyone's going in the same
direction in trying to use sendmail, you'll also need to make the /
directory non-group-writeable via "sudo chmod g-w /" or something similar.)
Ah yeah, perl, umm. Perl's going swimmingly, shockingly well on the new
platform, which is more than can be said for the Hard Drives on which it is
installed! Disk First Aid helped me for the first time *ever* this morning.
You could have knocked me over with a feather: found errors, repaired
errors, machine stopped flashing my longtime foe on boot (question mark on
floppy drive image) and actually rebooted in MacOS X. Perl, perl, perl...
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is recommended for profit and pleasure. Lots of fun
for all the MacOS X family. Given that the academic staff here just *lurv*
Excel spreadsheets it's rather nice to be able to feed in a collection of
tab delimited classlists in mbox format (ie coming from about 160 separate
email messages), remove the mail_headers/redundant_messages, rearrange the
ordering of the information, change the widths of certain columns of the
output, and produce circa one hundred spreadsheets in about 20 seconds. I
like *muchly*. (The script's almost certainly too format-specific to be much
help to anyone else, not to mention too ugly to see the light of day.
Suffice to say that it pretty much rides on the back of the tab2xls.pl
script in the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel distribution, adding a modicum of
formatting to a selection of columns.)
Cheers,
Paul
