Also, Gentoooooooo

since I'm on the subject of things that I've been fiddling with at work, I managed to get Gentoo serving out the web on my little pIII-450. (see 'My Current Homepage' on the sidebar). I ran into a couple of problems:

1. mod_auth_kerb didn't compile. there was a simple bug that had a string split across lines, that it didn't like, but getting it fixed and updated was a problem - I'd fix the bug, then attempt to --resume my emerge, but it would re-extract the source over my changes. it took a little searching, but I managed to find a few other people with the same problem, over on the Gentoo forums. seems that I needed to fix the source bug, then rebuilt the .tar.gz file, and generate a new MD5 for it, then put it into the portage tree. so, I think that I've found my first annoying thing about Gentoo.

2. my PHP4 and KERB_AUTH modules weren't being read. this was a bit of a confusing fix... they needed to be added to the /etc/conf.d/apache2 file, a la:

   APACHE2_OPTS="-D SSL -D PHP4 -D KERB_AUTH"

   but at first, the changes didn't seem to get picked up by apache2ctl when I restarted. I'm not sure what happened, but this afternoon when I tried it, they were picked up, and I was able to properly access things.

3. Oh, the mod_proxy stuff also appeared to be enabled by default. (¿¿¿) I didn't want to have my box turned into a spam server, thank you very much, so I turned that off before I even turned apache on.

so, all in all, I'm mostly impressed with Gentoo. the product has made installation of packages simple, and everything is tuned to my box. I'm contemplating using this for the kiosks that I need to make one of these days... and maybe the next incarnation of the department webserver, if I get adventurous.