Our group for installing and configuring the Apache server consisted of Ying Zhang, Yaling Yang, and Bob Viola.

We initially attempted to do a custom install of Apache into a specified directory, and we were under the impression that three configuration files in the handouts needed to be updated – access.conf, httpd.conf, and srm.conf. After downloading from apache.org and updating the three conf files with all of the information from the handouts, we could not start the server. We considered every option such as using port 8090 rather than 80, adding a ServerAdmin e-mail address, where to write error logs, LogLevel of warn, etc.

After finding that we could not start the server, we each tried a number of things to resolve our problems. We found it more difficult to work as a group when we ran into this problem because everyone had different solutions, none of which seemed to be working…"too many cooks" resulted in confusion.

Finally, we decided to reinstall the server using a typical install, using all defaults including folders. We learned that the server only uses the httpd.conf configuration file. We did not have time to make changes to the configuration file, so we used all the defaults from the installation. We created a default greeting a page and were successful starting the server.