read about in the preceding section of the chapter. The module is primarily intended for ISPs and similar large sites that host a large number of virtual sites. This module is for more advanced users and, as such, it is outside the scope of this introductory chapter. Instead, this section concentrates on the traditional ways of hosting virtual servers.
Address-Based Virtual Hosts
After you've configured your Linux machine with multiple IP addresses, setting up Apache to serve them as different websites is simple. You need only put a VirtualHost directive in your httpd.conf file for each of the addresses you want to make an independent website:
<VirtualHost 212.85.67.67>
ServerName gnulix.org
DocumentRoot /home/virtual/gnulix/public_html
TransferLog /home/virtual/gnulix/logs/access_log
ErrorLog /home/virtual/gnulix/logs/error_log
</VirtualHost>
Use the IP address, rather than the hostname, in the VirtualHost tag.
You can specify any configuration directives within the <VirtualHost> tags. For example, you might want to set AllowOverrides directives differently for virtual hosts than you do for your main server. Any directives that aren't specified default to the settings for the main server.
Name-Based Virtual Hosts
Name-based virtual hosts enable you to run more than one host on the same IP address. You must add the names to your DNS as CNAMEs of the machine in question. When an HTTP client (web browser) requests a document from your server, it sends with the request a variable indicating the server name from which it's requesting the document. Based on this variable, the server determines from which of the virtual hosts it should serve content.
Some older browsers are unable to see name-based virtual hosts because this is a feature of HTTP 1.1 and the older browsers are strictly HTTP 1.0-compliant. However, many other older browsers are partially HTTP 1.1- compliant, and this is one of the parts of HTTP 1.1 that most browsers have supported for a while.
Name-based virtual hosts require just one step more than IP address-based virtual hosts. You must first indicate which IP address has the multiple DNS names on it. This is done with the NameVirtualHost directive:
NameVirtualHost 212.85.67.67
You must then have a section for each name on that address, setting the configuration for that name. As with IP-based virtual hosts, you need to set only those configurations that must be different for the host. You must set the ServerName directive because it's the only thing that distinguishes one host from another:
<VirtualHost 212.85.67.67>
ServerName bugserver.gnulix.org
ServerAlias bugserver
DocumentRoot /home/bugserver/htdocs
ScriptAlias /home/bugserver/cgi-bin
TransferLog /home/bugserver/logs/access_log
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 212.85.67.67>
ServerName pts.gnulix.org
ServerAlias pts
DocumentRoot /home/pts/htdocs
ScriptAlias /home/pts/cgi-bin
TransferLog /home/pts/logs/access_log
ErrorLog /home/pts/logs/error_log
</VirtualHost>
If you're hosting websites on an intranet or internal network, users are likely to use the shortened name of the machine rather than the FQDN. For example, users might type http://bugserver/index.html in their browser location fields rather than http://bugserver.gnulix.org/index.html. In that case, Apache would not recognize that those two addresses should go to the same virtual host. You could get around this by setting up VirtualHost directives for both bugserver and bugserver.gnulix.org, but the easy way around it is to use the ServerAlias directive, which lists all valid aliases for the machine:
ServerAlias bugserver
For more information about VirtualHost, refer to the help system on http://localhost/_manual.
Logging
Apache provides for logging just about any web access information in which you might be interested. Logging can help with the following:
> System resource management, by tracking usage
> Intrusion detection, by documenting bad HTTP requests
> Diagnostics, by recording errors in processing requests
Two standard log files are generated when you run your Apache server: access_log and error_log. They are found under the /var/log/httpd directory. (Others include the SSL logs ssl_access_log, ssl_error_log, and ssl_request_log.) All logs except for the error_log (by default, this is just the access_log) are generated in a format specified by the CustomLog and LogFormat directives. These directives appear in your httpd.conf file.
A new log format can be defined with the LogFormat directive:
LogFormat '%h %l %u %t '%r' %>s %b' common
The common log format is a good starting place for creating your own custom log formats. Note that most of the available log analysis tools assume that you are using the common log format or the combined log format — both of which are defined in the default configuration files.
The following variables are available for LogFormat statements:
