Re: Enabling httpd


Subject: Re: Enabling httpd
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Thu Sep 20 2001 - 20:07:22 MDT


At 5:58 PM -0700 9/20/01, Brian Mayton wrote:
>I can't find where I need to enable HTTPD so that it will start up every
>time the server does, or for that matter, how to start it in the first
>place. On my old BSD system I had an inetd.conf file in /etc that I just
>uncommented httpd from. On YDL, apache is there, apache's config files are
>there, but I can't find an inetd.conf file.

YDL 2 uses xinetd rather than inetd. Look in /etc/xinetd.d/ for
configuration files to enable/disable the services that xinetd
controls.

However, it looks like YDL does not use xinetd to control HTTPD.
Instead, HTTPD (Apache) runs as a daemon on its own. You will need
to add it to the services started in your default runlevel (probably
runlevel 3 or 5). An easy way of doing this is with a GUI interface
is to use the RedHat control panel (invoke the "control-panel"
command as root from an xterm, then click on the Runlevel Editor).

Just a guess, but this setup is likely a consequence of some of
Terrasoft's customers: people who want to run (relatively) high
traffic webservers on rackmount PPC hardware. xinetd/inetd should
not be used for a service which is frequently used, because it adds
extra overhead to each connection attempt: the whole idea is that
inetd is a lightweight process that sits around waiting for
connections on the services it manages, rather than having each
server loaded all the time. This tradeoff is good for personal
workstations, but is a big penalty on a machine dedicated to a
particular service.

(actually, thinking about it, I'd guess that inetd/xinetd aren't a
good match for httpd in general, because I think browsers initiate
new connections for each object fetched from the server, rather than
have semipermanent sessions.)

-- 
Tim Seufert



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