Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : httpd.conf question.

[joubarani]

Hi,
I examined the httpd.conf that I have, and I found in the virtual hosts section that the line which contains the serveradmin is diffrent among the different sites as follows:
In several sites it is:
ServerAdmin Admin
And in the others is:
ServerAdmin site#
Where site# refers to the site location directory.
Can anyone explain where is the problem and how to fix it?
I appreciate your help,
regards,

[Travis]

Either is incorrect.

The ServerAdmin directive should have an e-mail address as an argument - it's used (among other things) in the display of error messages to give people a place to report the problem.

[Chicken]

I doubt there is a problem. The server admin has a slightly different setup than a normal site. If you FTP in, you'll notice the paths are different, etc.

[joubarani]

Hi Chicken,
We did not understand your reply. We are talking about the directive ServerAdmin in httpd.conf, we have in front of it in each virtual host section in this file either the word admin or the word site# and # refers to the site no. so site# refers to the location of the site files.

Dear Travis,
Thank you for your reply, you're right that this has to be an email address, but what is the relation between this line and the error that we had two days ago as follows:
One of our sites was working properly, we modified its IP and used its old IP for a new virtul host. After that when we tried to open the first site it redirected directly and fast to the second new one. We checked every thing related to setup but we did not find any error, then we deleted the two sites and removed all their files but the same problem consisted. After a long time we discoverd that we had ServerAdmin admin for the first site, we changed it to site18 the site no. of this virtual site and every thing went well and worked properly. It is weird we could not figure out how this happened and what is the relation between ServerAdmin and This problem. As I know the serveradmin is just an email address reported to users when any error happens with any site, so they can use this email to send a complain message, is it right?
Please give me an advice,
Regards,

[Chicken]

I now understand your problem, ignore my last post. I'm not certain what caused your problem, though changing IPs for a site can lead to problems (so I've read). In my httpd.conf *all* of my sites have:

ServerAdmin admin

The serveradmin is indeed the user admin, *not* the site#

[Befriend]

Originally posted by joubarani
Hi,
I examined the httpd.conf that I have, and I found in the virtual hosts section that the line which contains the serveradmin is diffrent among the different sites as follows:
In several sites it is:
ServerAdmin Admin
And in the others is:
ServerAdmin site#
Where site# refers to the site location directory.
Can anyone explain where is the problem and how to fix it?
I appreciate your help,
regards,

I believe the ServerAdmin directive is set to admin when there is no site administrator setup on the site. Is that the case for the site you're looking at? If so add a site administrator.

HTH,

[Chicken]

I don't think that is it, though you could be on to something. All of my sites have 'ServerAdmin admin' though this seems to make sense. The server admin is 'admin'. I'm not even certain if all the sites on the server have a siteadmin or not, but maybe some of yours do not?

[Befriend]

Originally posted by Chicken
I don't think that is it, though you could be on to something. All of my sites have 'ServerAdmin admin' though this seems to make sense. The server admin is 'admin'. I'm not even certain if all the sites on the server have a siteadmin or not, but maybe some of yours do not?

Well, the original poster didn't state which RaQ he is talking about and there are a lot of differences b/w all RaQ lines. Chicken, I believe in the RaQ4 all sites get a ServerAdmin of admin, but in earlier RaQs this wasn't the case. Offhand I don't know if the behavior was changed in the RaQ3 or RaQ4, but on a RaQ2 it's definitely as I described - the ServerAdmin is set to the sitename if there is no site admin setup for the site. Perhaps that was even corrected by a Cobalt pkg upgrade for the RaQ2, but if it was it's not installed on the box I checked.

[root]# grep "ServerAdmin" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | head
ServerAdmin admin
ServerAdmin admin
ServerAdmin site6
ServerAdmin site136
ServerAdmin site147

[Chicken]

Ahhhhh, further confusion, I see.