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I had a Leopard server with a few hundred users (students), and each of them was able to maintain their own web content in their Sites folders in their home directories -- and they could access them (from either inside or outside the network) by going to http://ourdomain.com/~studentname.

Just migrated to a Lion server, and everything is working perfectly, except now visiting any of those home directory sites nets us a 404. I can't find anything in the GUI apps that looks like it could help with this... am I missing something?

I've already tried re-creating the whole OD structure, but that hasn't helped.

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Pages 27-40 of the Migration Guilde go over the bulk of the manual migration steps. If you can't try these now, you might want to re-do the upgrade and run these manually to see if an error happened in one of the steps. If you're lucky, it's the apache2 files and not needing to re-migrate the open directory schema... – bmike♦ Sep 21 '11 at 13:23
I've already completely re-run the migration, though not via the individual manual steps -- there's no way I'll have the time to do it that way. I also completely rebuilt the OD schema, with no positive effect. If it's an Apache config problem, what I need to know is: How do I blow out the existing config and get a fresh one? – Triz Sep 21 '11 at 19:48
Other than reviewing the files listed as apache config - I've got no silver bullets. I'd start going over the apache logs, comparing the old config files with the new config files, it's going to be a bit of a chore nailing it down since it could easily be one of ACL, UID or apache configs. Does a newly created user show 404 for their web page? That might point towards or away from apache as the root cause. – bmike♦ Sep 21 '11 at 20:21
Yeah, newly created users also get the 404. – Triz Sep 22 '11 at 19:51
I have just looked at /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf which would seem to get included, and contains the UserDir directive as described. going for server/~user I get, in the error log, File does not exist: /Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/Default/~user so there remains an unexpected interaction – user21454 Apr 10 '12 at 15:21

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Found it: The UserDir module in Apache2 defaults to public_html. So ~studentname was being directed to /Users/studentname/public_html. Which doesn't exist in any of the users' folders.

What does exist is /Users/studentname/Sites, so I just added this line to the httpd.conf:

UserDir Sites

...and it's working perfectly now. Awesome!

Many thanks to @bmike for pointing me in the right direction.

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So happy you found the surgical option! Do choose this as the accepted answer - I appreciate the thanks. – bmike♦ Sep 22 '11 at 22:10
up vote 1 down vote

Can we assume you've gone over the following with a fine tooth comb - comparing the prior version to the new Lion versions?

Web configuration data is concentrated in the following files and directories:

  • /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
  • /etc/apache2/httpd_mailman.conf
  • /etc/apache2/httpd_squirrelmail.conf
  • /etc/apache2/magic
  • /Library/WebServer/ Web content

Additional web content is usually in:

  • /Library/WebServer/Documents/
  • /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/
  • Any other location where it resides (like the user home folders you are mentioning)
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Since there's nothing fancy about my webserver setup, I'm wondering: Is it safe to just blow all those files out? ie., will apache auto-create a new httpd.conf if it can't find one? – Triz Sep 22 '11 at 19:50
No (I don't think they regenerate without a re-install of the OS) - but here are the contents of my just 5 minutes ago installed clean Lion Server install... cl.ly/AMdc - use tar -tzvf apache2.tgz to view the contents - I did save things absolute - so use care you don't overwrite your /etc/apache2 when you expand these. – bmike♦ Sep 22 '11 at 22:09
1  
According to this answer, you can reset the web config with sudo serveradmin command web:command=restoreFactorySettings – Gordon Davisson Apr 10 '12 at 16:14
up vote 0 down vote

Mountain Lion removes personal web sharing as an option as it exposed user IDs. (~username)

Instead of turning it on for ALL users of a system, it is done on a per user basis.

Try the following as root (and substitute your username in place of username)

cd /etc/apache2/users
sed -e "s/Guest/username/g" Guest.conf > username.conf
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Are you referring specifically to Mountain Lion Server? Or just Mountain Lion? Does migrating from Lion to Mountain Lion actually disable personal web sharing if it was previously enabled? – Triz Jul 30 '12 at 16:05

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