Hello Everyone,
My name is Mike and I live in Des Moines, Iowa and I have been crash coursing into the realm of LINUX for the last couple of months. Which, I must say is highly interesting!
The winds of fate have forced me into the position of needing to learn how to set up, administer and run a LINUX web server. Over the last couple of months I have gotten quite a few general and in-depth books on the LINUX 7.2 version. I cap that off with constant Internet searches for more specific information on whatever step I am working on.
The ultimate goal is to have a virtual web hosting service type machine.
I should, at this point, lie out what I've done so far.
The test machine is outside my network with its own IP. (I will only have one IP for this machine)
1.) Installed RedHat 7.2 (Hopefully with all the options I need for this test machine)
2.) Set Up two regular users accounts.
3.) Installed Webmin
4.) Purchased 2 domain names from a registrar that allows me to set IP and MX records
mydomain.com….www.mydomain.com….mail.mydomain.com….-->machine IP
mydomain.net….www.mydomain.net….mail.mydomain.net….-->machineIP
alpha.mydomain.com is the test computer name
5.) Configured Send Mail so I can send locally and set up pop3 accounts outside the machine. (This was a considerable hair puller for me!!)
6.) Configure and run Apache to run for the main domain name.
In the references I have there is an item by item explanation of the configure steps in httpd.conf (some I can grasp, some I will have to grasp later)
Currently this works and resolves to the Apache test page when access via the Internet and the links from that document works (Although, even after enabling CGI in the httpd.conf, a simple CGI will not execute from the default HTML directory) Maybe this is not important at this point, as I read it is safer not to serve any pages from this main directory, it seems a waste of a domain name though?
7.) Set up and configure the second domain name as a virtual account.
My current stymie is I am not clear as to where to physically create the directories needed for the virtual account(s). The default install of LINUX partitioned a 15 gig hard drive to have about 10 gigs in the /var directory and about 3 gigs in the /home directory.
I have in the httpd.conf
Document Root “/var/www/html”
<Directory />
OptionsFollowSymLinks
AllowOverrideNone
</Directory>
<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
UserDir public_html
</IfModule>
What I am accustomed to seeing when I enter a hosting space on commercial host servers is a path like /home/username/public_html which is what I would like to have on my test machine but not necessary have to since it appears to me that the virtual domain users accounts have to be in the /var/www/html.
So my question should the path to the virtual accounts be/var/www/html/home/username/public_html
Or what is the correct path? Or the proper path?
I want to thank anyone who can offer input in advance, as I feel that I am splashing feebly in a very large ocean and land is very far away.
Best Regards,
Mike
