Serving a few local network sites, best way forward?

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Level 1

8 points

Serving a few local network sites, best way forward?

I occasionally do a bit of web design and off and on have hosted a few sites on my local network. Today I took on a bit more ambitious project to locally host a weather station.

Most of my day disappeared as I ran into a load of changes to the "WebServer" since the last time I fooled with it. I am running Mavericks and the last time I did much with the webserver was probably OS 10.4.

Just getting the default "It works!" page to come up was a chore and I really have no idea why it didn't work or how I got it to work.

Right now, I am discovering that I don't seem to be able to change the file permissions on folders and files in the

MyComputer>Libraries>WebServer>Documents directory which is where some of the advice I am reading suggests putting my sites.

The old standby of GetInfo and changing the permissions does not seem to work, nor does the advice to:

sudo chown -R :admin /Library/WebServer/Documents
sudo chmod -R g=rw,+X /Library/WebServer/Documents

All this has me wondering if the changes to OS X mean that the best route to doing what I want to do is to use OSX Server? The reviews on that piece of software are terrible though most speak to problems with VPN which I don't need.

Whichever way I go, there needs to be a simple way to clear out the old configurations and get my old sites moved to the "Right" place. Right now I am seeing dozens of index.html.en pages and the search is not even showing the files in the MyComputer>Libraries>WebServer>Documents

Posted on Jan 2, 2014 3:33 PM

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Answer 1

pamela.parks Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 4, 2014 2:29 PM in response to etresoft

I probably was a little short with my description of what I wanted to do with Apache. LAN only! Hope that clarifies. The setup would ideally provide a development and testing environment for php/mysql applications AND allow me to utilize wview (a weather station monitoring application which can be configured to run locally). I had several sites set up years ago and was surprised when I hit a snag installing and configuring wview in Mavericks. After trying dozens of suggestions, changing the permissions turned out to be the cure. The test pages are rendering perfectly. Wview is another matter. I have set that aside for the moment while I try to get what should be the simpler part of this working...browsing my sites from any machine on the network. I could build a single index and link to all the others or it might be more fun to learn about vhosts and how that could be used.

The discussion about the vulnerabilities of common routers was a real plus... quite chilling actually.

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Answer 2

etresoft

Level 8

46,530 points

Jan 4, 2014 6:09 PM in response to Neville Hillyer

Neville Hillyer wrote:

It was abandoned a few years ago - probably pressure from Netgear - it is far more powerful/flexible than anything Netgear produces. I will not replace it unless there is better open source firmware.

Let me know if you discover any general fix for the backdoor.

It was probably lack of interest from the developers rather than any pressure. This is not something I pay much attention to. I just noticed that particular story the other day. The DD-WRT project seems to be going strong. I think there are a few others for different brands. I still have an old Buffalo router (before the patent troll pushed them out of that business) running DD-WRT that I take on travel sometimes.

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Answer 3

Jan 5, 2014 4:52 AM in response to etresoft

With apologies to Pamela for adding further router information.

For those who end up here looking for excellent, unsupported but fully functioning, firmware for Netgear DG834XX series routers there is an unofficial DGTeam mirror at:

http://www.dgteam-mirror.talktalk.net/Home.html

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