Notes from the white board
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-12-14 06:12:52 - Graham EllisI come up with my best presentations in front of a class. There's nothing like having the adrennalin flowing to fine tune the way some information is got across, and nothing as good as an inquisitive group of delegate to inspire a new approach. So I end up with some notes on the whiteboard that I REALLY don't want to loose.
These days, I'm using my digital camera to record off the board. Yes, really. It's the best way, for me, to do it. Have you seen those whiteboards that record onto a sheet of paper, about A4 size, off a roll? Yes - I have too, and usually they're sitting in the corner gathering dust in a crusty conference room or just being used, not plugged in, as an expensive shite board. Have you seen those project-and-mark-over PC based systems that let you save you screen? Yes, but they can be awkward to use and you have to be writing / drawing on a designated, lower resolution, area. Thus - the 7.1 Megapixel camera.
But there's no 'perfect' way of recording the board. Ideally, a button pressed would record the board in a manual-quality set of diagrams, with words OCR'd too. My camera has compromised too.
Both of these diagrams are readable (just, but then I HAVE squashed them more than I usually would), but the one on the left is flashy and the one on the right is distorted. Personal choice - I'll stand slightly to one side as I take the picture and that'll prevent the flash bounce. If need be, Photoshop could be used to clean up.
Or - as in the case in point here - I can simply use the picture as the basis for typed documentation later ... here goes:
Setting up a web server - critical task excercise
1. Change the DocumentRoot - where the web site home is located - in 2 places in the configuration file. You really don't want the web site data to remain in the same area as the server software
2. Change the User and Group. There are security issues if you leave the user as nobody and the group as -1, especially if your web server is also a file server with somethng like NFS
3. Change the server name and the administrator's email address. Ensures that directories requested without a trailing /, and redirects, work correctly. Also that standard error pages give an appropriate email address for users to contact
4. Set up the error pages. You want to present your user with a professional "page not found" and not the minimal, standard one.
5. Change the log file format to "combined". It's worth adding extra information to your server logs if you're going to actively monitor traffic to your site and want to make best use of the available marketing and search engine information it can provide
6. If you want to run Perl or Python via CGI, turn it on Server side programs are off by default - a good decision as it's a facility you really want to consider carefully before offering
Other things to consider early in the configuration
a) Disable the Apache httpd manual pages??
b) Allow users to override default server settings in httpd.conf via a .htaccess file ??
c) Allow each user to have their own home directory in the form ~username ??
Further notes from the Whitebaord
I also made notes yesterday, via the whiteboard, on the file system structure of Linux and of httpd ... now documented in our solutions centre