RE: User Profiles

Scott,

Your changes look good to me but if you understand what your original config is 
doing and the things I pointed out about basic auth don't apply, there's no 
benefit to changing now.

You're right that the difference between ScriptAlias and ScriptAliasMatch isn't 
noticeable on sites that aren't particularly busy. My definition of "busy" is a 
few hundred thousand page views per month over a dozen or so virtual hosts 
(three of them use SSL) with each page running between 1 and 5 CGI programs per 
page view plus SSI's on every page with a good bit of Java and Net.Data tossed 
in for good measure. This is running on a single processor 840 partition with 2 
gb of memory and it *did* make a noticeable difference (especially when our 
more piggy Java apps are being used).

However, you can do some neat stuff with regular expressions and I'm not 
against using them where needed. I know I've seen examples of being able to get 
rid of or change extensions for CGI programs (and other content as well) but I 
can't think of where they're at. There may be some at http://httpd.apache.org 
and I think there's a few in the "Professional Apache 2.0" book but my copy's 
on loan at the moment. There's also a Redbook or Redpaper on configuring the 
Apache server that may have some examples in it but it's been many moons since 
I looked at it since the book was better at helping me when we migrated.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 12:37 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: RE: [WEB400] User Profiles


> The first is that ScriptAliasMatch isn't needed to enable CGI and will 
> drag down server performance on a busy site since it uses regular 
> expressions.

You're right.  I had changed it to ScriptAliasMatch to do some fooling 
around with removing the .PGM, but that caused other problems, so I 
switched it to what I have now -- which obviously isn't optimal.

However, on my box, the speed difference isn't noticable.


> The second is that doing basic authentication inside of Directory 
> containers is guaranteed to cause grief
[SNIP]
> it just doesn't work well when the physical path to a resource is 
> virtualized by it's run time (like with Net.Data or Java apps).

Thanks for pointing this out. I've never used Net.Data, and I haven't used 
Java in this manner -- so you may be right.


> It's much better to use Location containers to do basic authentication 
> since they operate off of the actual URI of the request and not the 
> physical location of the resource.

So, to fix this problem, I should configure Apache as follows, correct?

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin /QSYS.LIB/LIBCGI.LIB

<Directory /QSYS.LIB/LIBCGI.LIB>
    Order Allow,Deny
    Allow From all
</Directory>

<Location /cgi-bin>
    Require valid-user
    PasswdFile %%SYSTEM%%
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "AS/400 Sign On"
    ProfileToken on
</Location>
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