Saturday with a fine sunny weather. Perfect to get the sandals out this time. Yup! I actually prefer sandals than shoes.

Like my previous blog post I enjoyed some nice music & reading while traveling by bus. I reached Bagatelle a little before 14h00. Nitin Mutkawoa had arrived already. Natasha texted ealier she’s got some transport issue, she won’t be able to come. Yuram informed he’ll be late. Never mind, Nitin & me … we went to Mugg & Bean and ordered the regular Mocca Java. Strangely, Mugg & Bean was kinda empty. Good for us it was less noisy.

Nitin asked me about Apache virtualhosts and I tried enlightening him with the myriad things he can achieve by correctly defining directives in httpd.conf. Virtual Hosts allow us to run several websites on a single server. They can be IP based, that is, each website has a different IP address or Name based, that is, multiple websites running on the same IP address. I showed him how to use the virtualhost directives. Below is an extract taken from httpd.conf.

NameVirtualHost *:80

ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs

<Directory "/srv/www/htdocs">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

NameVirtualHost * – tells Apache that Virtual Hosts are running on all IP addresses available and should listen to port 80

Each Virtual Host is then defined within the <VirtualHost></VirtualHost> tags.

ServerName defines the domain name mapped to this website. ServerAlias as the name suggests is an alias, thus this domain name also will point to the current website. You can have more than one server alias.
ServerAdmin assigns an administrator email address to the website. In case of errors, this email address is shown up to report to.
DocumentRoot is the path that contains your website files.

See additional examples on Apache Documentation website.

We then talked about some scams (home job related) currently happening on facebook. It’s a bit sad to see that our fellow Mauritians are still liking & sharing stuffs on facebook without inquiring (even after what happened with the ponzi & internet banking scams).

Anousha texted & she came 30 mins afterwards. Neha & Darshinee could not make it this time as their class was extended till 16h00. Yuram also called, he could not make it due to transport issue.

When Anousha came we talked about the upcoming Linuxfest and started the technical discussion which I earlier posted on Facebook.

Update
Read comments by Jochen for tips about preferred domain. Most probably we’ll have another discussion on Apache virtual host in the coming meetups.