Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
William Rowe (Covalent Technologies) presented the new Apache 2.2.2 installer, now with SSL, that's available for Windows.
Apache and the toolset is distributed as a binary, since there's no expectation that a compiler will be available. Even with a compiler, it can be difficult to compile and build things like PHP.
The installer does all the things you might expect, including displaying the AFL, allowing some basic configuration information to be entered. Generally, it's recommended that you create a normal user (rather than guest) because it's a royal pain to make a guest user have enough of the exactly right permissions for things like PHP to run correctly. For convenience, a new service called Apache2.2 is created, which can be manipulated through the standard Services management console. Service dependancies work, so you can configure the Apache service to wait until something like TomCat has started before starting.
IIS Side effect - if you configure IIS to bind to port 80 on one ethernet address, and you have more than one interface, it will bind to every adaptor it can find in the machine. How blessedly competent... *cough*
Crypt passwords are not supported on Windows, so be sure to use hashed password (MD5 or SHA1 for example) and since we're trying to deprecate MD5, please try and move towards SHA1.
Before running Apache, we need to change the permissions for the logs/ directory and the proxy/ directories. This is where Apache wants to store logs and cached files respectively. Add write permissions for the user you created earlier.
The configuration files are broken into a small httpd.conf file, with includes pointing at files in the extra/ directory. This means that modules can be enabled and disabled simply by commenting out or uncommenting include lines. Remember to use / (forward slash) as the path delimiter, and quote whitespace in filenames. Apache configuration understands forward or backward slash in most cases, but things like mod_rewrite will need everything to be forward slash delimited.
The OpenSSL config file is not shipped with Apache 2.2.2 (promised that this will be fixed in 2.2.3) but you can pull the latest from the openssl website. Full details of this will be in the slide-set for this presentation (I will update the link to point directly at the slideset as soon as William has time to put it up.)
More information at:
