Another day – another lesson learned. Today I tried to optimize Apache HTTP server configuration in a sense to write less configuration to achieve the same result. Of course I messed up the first few times since I’m not really an admin and don’t have that much experience doing that. Typically relying on short configuration samples and snippets does the trick, but it’s not always the best way to do things.

This is yet another post on Apache httpd server installation and configuration. I say another because I’ve already written about how to install the packaged version of Apache for two specific linux distros. This time I’ll quickly jot down how I configured and compiled Apache for my needs. There are a few reasons to do this. One of the more important ones being to have a newer version of Apache. It seems that prepackaged Apache versions for some linux distributions can be quite out of date.

The Environment From time to time I need to do some Apache httpd + Tomcat installations on Linux servers and usually they come in different flavors. While you’re still experimenting it’s a good idea to use a pre-installed Linux on a virtual machine. I’m using the free VMware player to run virtual appliances, a list of which can be found on VMware page. Personally I like the clean Linux installations without any extras, this way you can install anything you need and create multiple virtual machines of the same Linux flavor with different purposes if you need to.