apache start problem

[Brian Dessent]

Alireza Ghasemi wrote:

> 1.I have never tried to create any username in Cygwin (Because I don't know
> how!).Also,I haven't given any username to apache.just I typed "apachectl
> start".How can I create a username in cygwin?
> 2.I have a very weak dial-up internet connection and downloading files with
> sizes more than 3..4 MB is difficult for me.so I prefer compiling source
> packages in my SuSe8.0 Cd's rather than downloading binaries from internet.

Cygwin does not have 'users' of its own.  Cygwin uses the user accounts
in Windows.  To add a user to Cygwin, create that user using the normal
Windows methods.

But this is not required at all.

In unix the unprivileged user account is typically named 'nobody'.  In
Windows, it's typically Guest.  So, just change your httpd.conf to use
Guest.  But really you should just comment that out alltogether because
the preferred way to run Apache is via a service, not with apachectl. 
Unless you're using 9x or ME don't even touch apachectl.  Install the
service and use "net start"/"net stop" (or cygrunsrv) to start and stop
it.  In this case it will be running as the SYSTEM user.  The
Cygwin-packaged Apache documentation covers this.

Furthermore, using an ancient Apache is a bad idea for a number of
reasons.  First, there are probably countless security vulnerabilities. 
There are also likely to be things that will need to be patched to work
with Cygwin in a version of Apache that old.  You should really use the
Cygwin packaged version of Apache, which is only 1.3MB.  If you have
problems downloading over dialup you should get a good download manager
that will let you resume the transfer without starting over.  There is
no reason to limit yourself because of slow download speeds, with the
proper software it becomes a non-issue.  You do not need to download the
files with setup.exe, you can download them with any program and then
use setup.exe to install them.

Brian

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/