Due to our customized Apache installation, there are a couple of notes to make about installing the popular Gallery program for yourself on Radix. Specifically, PHP scripts are run in CGI mode, and as the user that owns them. So when following the Installation Instructions for Unix with Shell Access on the Gallery page, please do the following things:
After completing these steps gallery should be ready to go! If you have problems, please let us know so we can update the instructions.
We have customized the web server configuration on Radix in an attempt to standardize our various web site configurations and make it easier for each end-user to self-manage their site. Most of these settings will be transparent, but there are a couple of special things to note for people who use special configurations, especially PHP scripts.
SuEXEC for CGIs and PHP scripts
Since one of the most common uses for PHP scripts on Radix is personal web galleries that people have set up, and due to the general inconvenience of running all PHP and CGI scripts as a single "www" user, we're going to configure Apache's SuEXEC module so that any CGIs and PHP scripts run from your home or web directories will be executed under your user id. This means that you will no longer need us to chown album directories to the web server and that you will be able to directly manage the files under your gallery directories.
Changes to make: We will be configuring the web server to automatically run PHP scripts in CGI-mode. This means that existing scripts that are interpreted directly by the web server will need to be made executable so they are runnable as a CGI. We've configured the OS to automatically recognize .php files and run them with the proper interpreter, all you need to do is chmod them so the Apache server can execute them. This can be done for all .php files under your web directory by running the following command from your public_html directory:
find ./ -name \*.php -exec chmod a+x {} \;
Making .php files executable is safe to do even on library files.
Changes to make: Since PHP and CGIs will be running as specific users, old installations of Gallery or other tools that write to the local filesystem will now be running as your UID. This means that the old album/ directories will be owned by the wrong user. We're *not* planning on doing a mass chown of files in web directories back to the original owners simply because we're not sure what people have changed and what they haven't. This will fall in to the "you'll need to look at your system and test it to make sure its working" category. Expect further recommendations on setting up Gallery itself.
Implementing VirtualDocumentRoot
To remove the need for multiple special-case configurations in Apache's httpd.conf we're going to standardize on one configuration that applies to all domains Radix hosts. This means essentially that a request for http://domain.tld/ will automatically look in /www/domain.tld/doc for HTML files and /www/domain.tld/cgi-bin for scripts to run (more on CGIs below). This is an incredibly simple way to set up the system, but it doesn't automatically handle server aliases like http://www.domain.tld/ (which some people use and some don't).
Changes to make: If your domain is regularly accessed using something other than the standard http://domain.tld/ configuration you will need to let us know what ServerAliases you want to configure to support. Please only consider doing this if you have www.domain.tld published far and wide, as its simpler for everyone (us, you, Google, statistics generators, etc) to standardize on one domain.
.htaccess AllowOverrides
To get rid of special-case cgi-bin and directory access configurations in the global httpd.conf, we're going to open up the use of .htaccess files for pretty much everything you can configure, from authentication to CGI control to error pages. This means that essentially every configuration option you might want to tweak for your site will be available to you by modifying these files in your web directories. An excellent overview of what kind of flexibility you will have can be found here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/htaccess.html
When you read this page you'll notice that Apache actually recommends against people using .htaccess files for a couple of reasons, one of which follows:
The second consideration is one of security. You are permitting users to modify server configuration, which may result in changes over hich you have no control. Carefully consider whether you want to give your users this privilege.
We're doing this to make everyone's life easier, so we're again reminding people to follow our general terms of service: "Don't be a hozer, ehh."
If you're curious as to what specific changes we made to the configuration file, they are documented here.
Per-user Quotas Expanded to 5GB. This should be plenty for any sane person. The system will send you a warning mail when you exceed 4.5GB. We will soon be implementing per-user quotas on /var/mail as well.
You can use the "quota" command from a shell prompt to easily see how much disk space you are currently using.