[Glastonbury] L+A+M+P

[Tim Hall]

Ok, ok,
My objections are overturned.

I've successfully set up Apache as a local server, so it's now serving up a 
house intranet. Oddly enough the pages seem to come up faster on the 
connected Windoze machines than the local Linux box. I've successfully 
transferred the relevant data and knocked up some report pages so I can see 
what's going on.

It works much better since I de-ifconfig'd the tap0 interface. Can anyone 
tell me what it is / stands for? (it's a ?device / ?socket like eth0 or ppp0).
Still, it works much better without it.

It's about the closest thing to Lego(TM) in programming terms that I have yet 
encountered. I grudgingly have to admit that I rather like it. so far. It's 
fun, it produces immediate results and it's fairly easy to debug - although I 
can see the benefit in documenting data tables and which-page-does-what for 
when I come back to it in 6 months time and think "what the hell was I doing 
here?"!

One subject that may be worth covering for the group is Users / Permissions / 
Security type stuff. I haven't actually got my head round the subject 
properly yet. Fr'instance what username should my pages be calling up data 
as?  - www-data (?) or something else? clearly not 'root' (in MySQL). Surely 
the permissions for the A+M+P bit would all want to be unified? - and 
completely separate from the Linux system logins :-)

While were at it we're setting up a coyote linux box to act as a masquerading 
firewall for the house network. So far the box is pingable, but not much else.
I've also not managed to change my gateway setting on my Debian box - most of 
the relevant /etc/ files are managed by debconf and I can't remember which 
utility actually rewrites them :-/
Coyote also has no 'pon' so I'm not sure how to independantly test the ppp 
settings. hum. I'm slowly working my way through the IP-Masquerading and 
Firewalling HOWTOs. Hopefully these answers will turn up somewhere.

Still, thanks for a great introduction to the subject.

cheers

tim hall