Ideas….

So I have a server with an SSL cert.  It requires a passphrase every time I restart.  This is slightly annoying.  So one of my coworkers recommended the following:

1. create a simple perl script that prints the password
2. in the ssl.conf file change SSLPassPhraseDialog builtin to SSLPassPhraseDialog exec:/location/to/passphrase.pl
3. restart apache

It works beautifully.  I am of course writing this down because I will forget what he told me in like 5 minutes.

I poked around and it seems simple enough to do.  Below are a few posts that describe this:

• http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=14126
• http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=74380
• http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=35937

It seems easy enough to change.  Once I get my test server up and running I’ll go in and change the domain name in the config.php file to make sure I’m not going to break anything.  I’m sure it will be fine, but better safe than sorry.

A bigger problem we’re having is Mac Servers run something called Performance Cache on port 80 (aka the default web port) and Apache on port 16080.  What’s annoying about this is that (if you let it) all your web pages will end up pointing to port 16080…a complete pain.  This article on the Mac OS X Server 10 talks about this Performance Cache, Apache, and the ports.

One way to resolve the port 16080 issue is to turn off Performance Cache.  Below are instructions for doing this on Server 10.4.11:

1. open Server Admin
2. click Web in the list of services
3. click Sites in the tab list at the top of the screen
4. choose the site in your list which is constantly showing port 16080 in web addresses and click the pencil button at the bottom of the window to edit the site.
5. click Options in the tab list at the top of the screen
6. uncheck the box next to Performance Cache

Again once I get my test server, I’m going to have to poke around and make sure that I don’t need to change anything in Apache as well.  I did notice that Apache on a Mac makes use of .conf files (stored in /etc/httpd/sites) for each of the websites it creates.  Within each of those files you’ll see the <VirtualHost> tags and info that Apache people are used to.  I’m assuming that Mac’s Server Admin tool will update these files for me, but you know what they say about assuming.  I did find this one forum post that suggests I may need to go in and change those conf files myself.  We shall see….

Friday I decided to be a complete and utter geek and install Apache Tomcat on my Mac.  I know, I know you’re asking me “But Rosalyn Apache comes with a Mac, why do you need Tomcat?”  Well that’s a good question.  And the answer is I wanted to install XTF which is an XML publishing tool developed by CDL (California Digital Library), and XTF requires that you use Tomcat in order to run it (or you can use Resin…but I’m an Apache fan).

So now you’re thinking, “How did you do it?”  I wish I could have thought it up on my own, but saddly I didn’t.  I looked at a few pages and then finally settled on Basil Borque’s section (under Update 2006) on this wiki page: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/TomcatOnMacOS.  Bravo to Basil for posting the directions.  I didn’t bother with the firewall though because my laptop is behind a firewall by default.  Also I wanted to still run Apache so I left Tomcat on its default port 8080.

Once I got Tomcat up and running, I then moved on to XTF.  This process was ridiculously easy.  CDL has wonderful XTF installation directions on the SourceForge XTF Wiki.  If you’re on Wheaton’s Campus (and my computer is currently connected to the internet) you can view XTF here.