LIGO Data for ELabs served via the web

The Apache web server "httpd" is used to serve the data via a web URL of the form http://servername.caltech.edu/data/frames/....

Any recent version of the Apache httpd web server should work for this purpose. We will assume that the primary configuration file is installed in /etc/httd/conf, but if you build and install from a source package it will be something like /usr/local/apacheconf. We will put as much of the configuration as possible into a separate file in a separate subdirectory for ease of maintainance. The steps are:

1. Go to the web server configuration directory (eg /etc/httpd/conf) and create a subdirectory called local.d.
2. Edit the main configuration file, httpd.conf, and at the end of the file add these lines:

   # 
   # Load local config files for virtual servers or specific areas
   
   Include conf/local.d/*.conf
   

   As the comment indicates, this will load all files ending in ".conf" from that subdiectory.
3. Go down into that subdirectory and create a file named i2u2-rds.conf, which contains:

   Alias  /data/frames    /data/ligo/frames
   
   <Directory "/data/ligo/frames">
       Options Indexes MultiViews IncludesNoExec
       IndexOptions FancyIndexing IconsAreLinks ScanHTMLTitles
       AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes 
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>
   

   Here /data/ligo/frames is the path to the data storage area -- adjust accordingly.
4. Always check the configuration file for errors before restarting the daemon. The command is

   apachectl configtest 

   or you can try

   /etc/init.d/httpd configtest 

   The response should always be Syntax OK. If not, fix any problems.
5. Restart the daemon:

     /etc/init.d/httpd restart
   

For reference, the configuration files used on tekoa and on the spy-hill server (named "alvarez") can be obtained via CVS with

 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@spy-hill.net:/usr/local/cvsroot/i2u2 co src/httpd/tekoa
 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@spy-hill.net:/usr/local/cvsroot/i2u2 co src/httpd/alvarez

but these contain the configuration for much more than just serving /data/ligo/frames.

-- Main.EricMyers - 09 Dec 2008