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Apache must be started as root since only root can bind to port lower than 1024. The individual listeningprocesses run as the nonpriviliged www user though, as you see. As for the ownership of the files in the Web directory, that's mostly your call. I set them to be owned by whoever will need to edit them most frequently . One thing I do though is to not make them writeable by the www user though so they can't be modified by the web server itself (of course the www user must be able to read them).
Originally posted by btmiller Apache must be started as root since only root can bind to port lower than 1024. The individual listeningprocesses run as the nonpriviliged www user though, as you see. As for the ownership of the files in the Web directory, that's mostly your call. I set them to be owned by whoever will need to edit them most frequently . One thing I do though is to not make them writeable by the www user though so they can't be modified by the web server itself (of course the www user must be able to read them).
A little trick I came up with to avoid having to be root to start httpd: Have httpd listen on some high port (like 6666), then setup firewall rules to redirect all incoming traffic on 80 to 6666 and all outbound traffic on 6666 to 80. The fewer root processes you have running the better, right?
BTW - Good idea to take away apache's write access to the DocumentRoot! I'll go implement that now...
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