On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Lars Eilebrecht wrote:
> According to Joshua Slive:
>
> > But what most people want is "Listen to all IP addresses".
> > This is the current default behaviour. How do we express
> > that?
>
> I see your point, but do we really want to express that?
> If one has two or more interfaces configured he's usually
> dealing with virtual hosting, so what's wrong with
> a <VirtualHost> directive _and_ a related Listen directive?
> I've seen more than on setup where Apache was listening on
> all interfaces, but that behaviour actually was not intended.
> E.g., what's the point in listening on 127.0.0.1?
I think I disagree. I believe that the naive user generally does want to
listen on all interfaces. Listening on 127.0.0.1 is often very valuable
for testing purposes. I expect a great increase in "Apache won't respond
even though it is running" problem reports if we change this behaviour.
The most common problem I hear about is people behind port-forwarding (or
NAT) firewalls. These people have a very hard time figuring out what to
put in NameVirtualHost and VirtualHost directives. The new
"NameVirtualHost *" configuration, in conjunction with the default
behaviour of listening on all interfaces, is great for these people.
Sure, it is a crutch for people who don't understand what is going on, but
I don't see that it opens up any problems.
Joshua.
