Home pages for regular users

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

Matthew J Brodeur <mbrodeur at nexttime.COM> writes:

	  Another way to do this is to actually create dirs under DocumentRoot
	that are owned by the users.  This is the easiest way, and it keeps all of
	the web content in the same directory tree.  I'm sure, however, that this
	is considered a "Bad Thing" for one reason or another.

It's not a Very Bad Thing, but there is one potential hassle  if  you
do  this:   It  puts  all  the  users'  web directories into the same
partition as DocumentRoot.  If you run out of space there,  then  the
admin  needs  to spend time fixing things up.  If the server uses the
users' public_html directories, then their  files  are  in  the  same
partition  as their home directories, and they can take care of their
own space problems.  If you decide  to  move  some  users  to  a  new
partition,  their  web  files  go  along  with no need to remember to
fiddle with the contents of DocumentRoot.

Of course,  you  could  combine  the  two,  by  making  an  entry  in
DocumentRoot  for  each user that is a symlink to their ~/public_html
directory.  Then you'd just have to make sure that this  happens  for
each  new user.  If you move a user's home directory, you'd also want
to check that their symlink in DocumentRoot is still correct.

The ~/public_html scheme is the least hassle for administrators on  a
multi-user machine.  But if it's a small machine with only one or two
users, it doesn't make much of a difference to anyone.

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