Message-Id: <199612182257.WAA09257>
Subject: Mail from NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b5 (fwd)
To: apache <new-httpd@mail.apache.org>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 22:57:06 +0000 (GMT)
From: Rob Hartill <robh@imdb.com>
Organization: Internet Movie Database Ltd.
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not acked

----- Forwarded message from michaelm@si.umich.edu -----

From: michaelm@si.umich.edu
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 17:37:41 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <199612182237.RAA07846@login1.si.umich.edu>
To: apache-bugs@mail.apache.org
Subject: Mail from NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b5
Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: NCSA Mosaic 2.7b5 on Sun
X-URL: http://www.apache.org/docs/misc/security_tips.html

I would like to report a bug in Apache 1.2b2, running under SunOS 4.1.4.

Bug: 

The DocumentRoot directive is not always processed correctly inside a 
<VirtualHost> section.  These Virtual Hosts have the same IP address, but
different ports.  I have put all of the configuration info in httpd.conf, with
no access or srm.conf file, if that makes any difference.

Symptoms: 

My configuration file has two <VirtualHost> sections, and I put a
different DocumentRoot in each one.  Most requests would go through fine, but
some would (seemingly randomly) cause an error as follows:

  access to /usr/local/etc/httpd failed: does not exist

Given that this is the default, I assume that something is slightly screwy
about the mechanism for determining which DocumentRoot to use.

What I did to fix it:

I put an extra DocumentRoot directive in, before the first <VirtualHost>
section, copying the one from one of the VirtulHost sections.  This seems to
have eliminated most of the errors, since the set of valid URLs from each of
the two document roots is nearly identical.  

However, I think it likely that occasionally a request to the other Virtual
Host will be looked up in the wrong document root directory.

Previous versions of the server:

This problem seems to have been even worse under Apache 1.1.1.  I could not
get the former version to work at all properly -- both Virtual Hosts insisted
on using the same value of DocumentRoot (and several of the other parameters
as well), not overriding the defaults I had set previously in the configuration
file.

  Michael McClennen
  System Administrator, the Internet Public Library

----- End of forwarded message from michaelm@si.umich.edu -----

-- 
Rob Hartill.       Internet Movie Database Ltd.    http://www.imdb.com/