Comments on: ISP-In-A-Box: The $500 Mac mini (Chapter XI, Web Calendars)

By: Alain Chesnais

Alain Chesnais — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 11:38:24 +0000

To answer the issue with URL’s getting redirected to machinename.local as referred to in posting number 1, the culprit is the setting for

UseCanonicalName On

This can be set to Off in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Another way to handle this if you have a nameserver running is to explicitly set the ServerName variable in the same file

=Alain

By: amyhr

amyhr — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:07:58 +0000

This series is great, it puts a whole lot of things right where I need them!. I do have one question: What are the security ramifications of hard linking the files instead of a cronjob? (soft link did not work). It doesn’t look like this app modifies the files, so there’s not much risk of losing all the data. I’d actually rather cron a backup of the .ics files, as the hard link would allow instantaneous updating…

[WM: Sorry but I don’t understand the question. I’m not the sharpest blade in the drawer so please rephrase your question for me.]

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:14:52 +0000

If these pages were paperback books, I’d have worn them out by now. Thanks so much for getting all this information into one place.

I’ve been going back and forth between using WebDAV for publishing iCal calendars and using this much more straightforward approach. What are the benefits of each?

By: jeanloui

jeanloui — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:13:19 +0000

Following your interesting master class, I found a better tool (and easier to install than Webmin) called Cronnix for managing the cron schedules:
http://h5197.serverkompetenz.net/cronnix/

[WM: Thanks for the tip. We’re going to cover it in our segment on crontab.]

By: Steve D

Steve D — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 22:14:22 +0000

Let me second Scott’s comment and mention that this is an incredible set of articles.

I also second Scott’s problem with the Rendevouz name resolution, I have a similar home network setup. The cruddy way around this is to complete your URLs with a slash, or target the index page itself. So for instance if you wish to access webalizer (as setup in chapter 6, http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=30 ), do this from your PC:

http://macserverip/webalizer/

OR:

http://macserverip/webalizer/index.html

NOT:

http://macserverip/webalizer

This is also apparently also an issue when accessing pages from the outside world. I’m not network saavy enough to know what is going on here, but it seems that there should be a config setting to change to fix this.

Steve

[WM: There is an Apache setting for this but I’m out of town. Here’s a link that will get you started anyway: http://frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/archives/2004/05/08/apache-and-the-trailing-slash-problem/]

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:46:41 +0000

It just so happens that I was working on this very problem last night. What you need to do (I believe) is add a forward slash to the end of the subdirectory. So, for example, rather than http://xxx.xxx.xx.xx/ical you enter http://xxx.xxx.xx.xx/ical/
Try this and see if works. –Doug

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 22:56:14 +0000

First of all, thanks for this awesome series. I’m a web developer so I’m pretty familiar with a lot of what’s going on here, but it’s still a great quick resource for letting beginners tackle what seems to be an intimidating task. You should write a book!

Anyway, I’ve never really fiddled around with Macs as web servers until now and am still getting to grips with it. Here’s my question. When I navigate to my Mac from a browser on my PC (XP) in the same network (behind a normal linksys dhcp router) and using the Mac’s IP address, only files in the root directory are viewable. What’s happening is that the server is for some reason redirecting all subdirecties to http://username.local, or the Rendevouz name. This works fine on my Mac, but it doesn’t work from my PC. It just gives me the error, “www.username.local cannot be found. Please check the name and try again.” Why is it doing this? Any help would be much appreciated.