Forum OpenACS Q&A: Two questions: Virtual hosting and port 8000

I have a couple of questions:

1. Can we do name-based virtual hosting with OACS?

2. Can OACS work fine in port 80 instead of 8000?

thanks!

You have to be the superuser under Unix/Linux to bind to port 80. That's why we default to port 8000, we assume that first you develop a site and later make it a production site. When developing ... you don't really want to force the sysadmin to give every developer superuser privileges on the system just so they can start/restart AOLserver.

To run on port 80 you start AOLserver as the superuser. You pass AOLserver a non-superuser user (for instance "aolserver") with the "-u" switch.

AOLserver then starts as root, binds to port 80, and after binding set itself as the non-superuser user you've passed in with "-u". For security reasons, AOLserver won't run as superuser, you must provide a non-superuser user for it to switch to after binding to port 80 running as superuser.

Make sense?

AOLserver needs to be prebound to port 80. Try this from root:

/usr/local/aolserver/bin/nsd-postgres -t /var/lib/aolserver/luisegarcia/etc/config.tcl -u my_user -g my_group -b w.x.y.z:80

where w.x.y.z is the ip address.

cheers,
Torben