The idea is not mine, it is taken from Directadmin Official Site and is also listed on Directadmin Forum. I will post it here as I am trying to create a comprehensive guide on how to deal with Linux servers. So, first of all we need to have root access, and I’d advise you to shut down Apache before trying to update it. The command is

service httpd stop

Next you need to do the following list of commands:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/customapache
./build update
./build clean
./build update_data_ap2
./build convert
./build apache_2
./build php_ap2 n
./build mod_frontpage_ap2
./build mod_perl_ap2
/sbin/service httpd restart

This will download and install the latest Apache build and will compile it with most used modules. After the Apache is rebooted, your changes are applied and you should have a fully functional version of Apache. I just performed this action on the VPS where this site is located in order to improve its performance. I recommend you to do the same.

The first advice is to view Apache server status. I have already written how to enable it here. This will allow you to monitor Apache requests and will show you which requests are most popular and which of them cause problems.

If you have many users on your server, suphp might help you to identify the problem. As all php scripts are run by corresponding user, you will be able to identify which user causes most server load related to Apache.

This article does not describe the process of identification of MySQL server load. Maybe I will write about it later.

I’ve found a solution at a forum. You’ll need a simple shell script and here it is:

#!/bin/sh
run=`ps ax | grep /usr/sbin/httpd | grep -v grep | cut -c1-5 | paste -s -`
if [ "$run" ];
then
echo “Apache is running”
else
/etc/init.d/httpd start
fi

This script will check for a number of running script processes and will try to start apache if it is not running. You should add this script to crontab with any frequency you like. I’d suggest to run it every 3 minutes as it doesn’t cause server load, but your apache stability is vital.

preg_match_all(“/<tag>(.*?)<\/tag>/”, $source, $results);

This construsion will create an array with extracted data. All you need is to change “tag” to any tag you like. This string was created to parse xml files, but it will work for simple HTML tags without attributes too.

The function above will extract all occurences of regular expression match. $output will contain an array with the extracted values. Please, run var_dump to check what’s in this array

When you update your PHP installation via Directadmin build system or when you do this manually, new modules are added to httpd.cond, but the older ones are not deleted. This usually causes problems, as apache refuses to start after PHP upgrade, What do you need to do in order to tun apache again?

You need to edit your httpd.conf file (it is usually located at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf). Open this file fith any editor you like and comment all strings that contain “php4″. The same directives for PHP5 are added automatically so you don’t have to worry about it. When you comment everything related to PHP4, you should save httpd.conf and try to reboot apache. If everything is OK, it should start, if not – you have to follow its logs or errors you receive at the command line window. Let me remind you that most useful way to restart apache is service httpd restart.

When you run your PHP scripts, that are creating files, they almost in all cases are started by user Apache. This user has all the permissions on the created files. So we have Apache as an owner and Apache as the Group. That’s why we don’t have access to these files – we simply don’t own them.

I know two different solutions for this problem. The first one is quite intelligent – to use suphp. This is an Apache module, that allows to run php by the user that initially owns the executed file. That’s a great solution as it is done for entire server and all users’ scripts will be affected.

Another solution is not so beautiful, It’s a “patch” for scripts that are actually running. If you don’t have suphp installed or don’t want to install it for any reason, you can use root crontab to chown files created by your scripts. For example, we will recursively chown a folder where script generated files are located. Just add the following line to your root crontab:

*/10 * * * * chown user:user /folder_to_chown

This is not quite a good idea but I don’t know any other solutions at the moment.

A simple string in .htaccess file will save you. Here it is:

IndexIgnore *

In some cases the following string will also work:

Options -Indexes

One of these two solutions will lead you to showing 403 error to the user that tries to look what files are located in your directory. But let me repeat – this is a security hole and you should notify your system administrator about this issue. This is an emergency solution…

<?

// Getting the page with server status

$sekas=file_get_contents(“http://localhost/server-status”);
// Locating the position of the number of requests displayed

$pos=strpos($sekas, “requests currently being processed”)-5;
// Creating regexp pattern for replacement
$pattern=”[^0-9]“;
// Replacing non-numeric symbols
$traseu=ereg_replace($pattern, “”, substr($sekas, $pos, 5));
echo $traseu;
?>

Hope this code will help you.

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
#UserDir public_html
UserDir disabled
</IfModule>

Mod_userdir is active by default so you should pay attention to it if you don’t really want your site to be displayed with IP and username