I’m folllowing the execllent HOWTO from Sweerdna to set up an Apache based web-server on my home lan (as a setep to publishuing on a hosted system). I was geeting on fine until I moved to one of my Windows clients, started Dreamweaver and began to define a site. For the remote site, Dreamwaver 2004 MX offers to browse to the web-server location where I want to build my web–site - which, according to Swerdna’s guide is in /<servername>/srv/www/htdocs.
My windows (and other Linux) client can only see users and groups on the server - how can I possibly get to /srv/www/htdocs. with write permission, from a client machine -any client machine? Surely none is ever going to have write permission to that location?
I’m not sure on your solution but if I tell you my experience, it may help.
I use ftp: to access my Son’s windows server to manage web site folders and files. Access is secured by IP, username and password.
My home Box (Linux) I can access on the LAN (Only the LAN) from my Laptop using fish://. Or kssh which allows me to run any application on the Box with X-display on the laptop. Once in that way I can access anything. But it’s secured by IP allocation, Public Key and password.
I appreciate the guidance. There’s clearly something I don’t understand here:
Apache. under Linux. is overwhelmingly the web-server of choice across the complete range of web-site sophistication. Dreamweaver is still, for a major proportion of windows/mac-based developers, the tool of choice. Both of these claims of mine have been true (I think) for at least 5 years.I think it is entirely reasonable of me to expect therefore that DreamWeaver can define and create a remote site on a Linux/Apache server without problem - but I just cannot see how it can do it without having write permission to root-owner resources. This seems to me to be extremely unlikely.
I really want to use DreamWeaver in this way because it will give me the great benefit of being able to synchronise my local, remote and test web-sites - avoiding some horrible problems thereby.
I have posed the question to Swerdna. He has requested that I post it here on this forum, presumably so that others can benefit from any replies that kind people, like yourself, provide.
> I’m folllowing the execllent HOWTO from Sweerdna to set up an Apache
> based web-server on my home lan (as a setep to publishuing on a hosted
> system). I was geeting on fine until I moved to one of my Windows
> clients, started Dreamweaver and began to define a site. For the remote
> site, Dreamwaver 2004 MX offers to browse to the web-server location
> where I want to build my web–site - which, according to Swerdna’s guide
> is in /<servername>/srv/www/htdocs.
>
> My windows (and other Linux) client can only see users and groups on
> the server - how can I possibly get to /srv/www/htdocs. with write
> permission, from a client machine -any client machine? Surely none is
> ever going to have write permission to that location?
Just setup the DW FTP site the same way as standard FTP client: use the
user/password you have configured to access files under your linux box,
which probably is your opensuse user.
Underneath htdocs I make a series of folders, one for each website I want to put there, and I make them to be owned by webmaster suzette. Suzette administers the website. (look for the word “suzette” in my tutorial).
Look more closely at the tutorial and follow the travels of webmaster suzette. She owns the document root /srv/www/htdocs/swerdna.org and puts her files in the folder “swerdna.org” and makes that her document root. She has ftp access to that folder and edit’s files in there using Quanta+, so I suppose if she understood dreammaker, she could access the files from that too.
It’s ok to make subfolders within /srv/www/htdocs owned by the people who will be updating them so that they can write to files within them. Just make sure the files are publicly readable so that Apache can serve them. I recommend using sftp if updating from outside the LAN so that password cannot be sniffed.
If you are using DW on a Mac, be sure to set the line endings to Unix style or your PHP scripts won’t render.
All these response are most helpful - thank you all. Actually, I think I am just confusing myself as well as confusing you all. Here’s the step that I cannot take:
When using DreamWeaver, the starting point is to define local (development) and remote (production) web-sites (which is nothing more, I think, than the creation of a suitable folder in which to put an ‘index.html’ file). Creating the local site is no problem. DW asks for the location of the remote site to be specified using what I would describe as a file-naming convention. One can either type this in an entry box or use the option to browse to the desired location on the remote machine which is going to act as the web-server.
Having done that, then DW can ‘upload’, or put, the site files, when they are ready, using a number of methods - of which ftp is the most obvious and usual. I don’t think there will be any problem in doing the ftp step.
The big issue is that I cannot browse to a site like //<my-web-server>/srv/www/htdocs - and I don’t understand why. Yes, I have got my own version of Suzette (not as nice looking I’m sure, but still functional) who ‘owns’ the files as Swerdna suggests.
I guess the key difficulty is that I am using SAMBA shares - users and groups - in order to browse files and folders across the LAN. I didn’t see anything in the HOWTO about not using SAMBA . I’ll read again to see what I missed.
I stoped using windows apps some time ago, but I am fully familiar with the Dreamweaver version you are using. It works very nicely.
Now I use Quanta and Bluefish.
But even back when I did use dreamweaver I never used the function you are trying to use.
I always prefer to use ftp:// manually from konqueror.
Login to the server which is configured to permit me full r/rw access. I then just copy and paste the new folder contents to the server. But this I can see may seem rather clonky in comparison.
In the tutorial I didn’t mention any method for going to the remote site. I should edit it and tell users two things: (a) not to use Samba and (b) that a good method is an encrypted ftp like sftp. I have used Konqueror as my ftp client (like caf4926) and lately I use Filezilla because I’ve switched from KDE to the excellent Gnome (don’t flame me ppl).
If dw uses a built in ftp client to get to remote sites, then if you enable password protected ftp access to the doc root you’ll probably be good to go there in dw. But am I hearing from you that dw uses windows-style file sharing?
Aside from the intriguing comments about Gnome (which I must avoid persuing here), I am also intrigued about how to ‘enable password protected ftp access to the doc root’. Is that a setting inside the main apache conf file?
I’m probably talking utter bol-ox about file naming in DW. As I said, one can either specify the address on the remote system where the site is to be created, or use DW to browse to it. In the latter case I presume it is a drill down from ‘My Network Places’ - except that for me the drilling process ends either at the most deeply nested file in my user id on the server or in that of the user equivalent to Suzette. I certainly cannot get to /srv/www/htdocs in the way that I can using, say, Dolphin locally on the server. And I certainly can’t do it from a Linux system on the LAN either. So browse doesn’t work.
If I attempt to specify the location, using for example //<server-name>/srv/www/htdocs (windows uses back slashes of course) then DW presents me with the error message: “Cannot display the remote folder. The network path was not found”.
And at that point I’m dead in the water, surrounded by inappropriate metaphors, as far as having a web-site managed by Apache goes.
Apologies, I’m slightly off thread here, but are you saying that Quanta is a viable alternative to DreamWeaver (and this is the important bit) for a new web-site ‘developer’? - who last wrote in mark-up language when it was called GML, (which was not publicly available), back in 1978 or so. Dreamweaver is most supportive of simple users like myself, with its ability to “almost” create in WYSIWYG mode, then quickly test on a real browser and switch to a code view immediately if that is required.
As I remember it, the old ‘compose mode’ GML it was very much WYGINWYW (What you get is not what you want) mode, with tables being a serious challenge. How does Quanta do it?
//<server-name>/srv/www/htdocs
is utterly wrong as a concept. It implies that the root of the remote computer is shared – that the whole, entire, complete filesystem is shared, which is not what you set up.
You didn’t share / so you can’t write //<server-name>/etc
You didn’t share srv so you can’t write //<server-name>/srv/etc
You didn’t share htdocs so you can’t write //<server-name>/www/htdocs
What you should and probably did share/enable is a directory way down the file system tree. So the address would be more like this:
//<server-name>/network_name_of_folder
without prepending the (invisible, non shared) parts of the filesystem address.
Now, we can’t really proceed to the proper description of the server’s network address until you tell us what you’re using in dream weaver for network communications: is it windows file sharing (aka SMB communications aka Samba) or is it some form of ftp?
Your use of the colour highlight here makes this much easier to understand - thanks for this.
Right now I don’t have a any folder (that I have created) in /srv/www/htdocs - I have only got to the stage of being able to see the ‘It Works’ page from my Linux clients on my LAN. I thought a folder, containing my highest level web-site file (index.html ?), would be defined for me in /htdocs by DW as part of the remote site definition. I expected that DW had already gathered enough information, as part of the local site definition, to be able to name that folder in /htdocs. Are you saying that I should do that myself - using my counter-part to Suzette?
I cannot be sure of what DW is doing. But my guess is that right at the start o the process of developing a site in DW, when it is wanting to defines the remote site, it is using Windows file sharing. This looks like a one-time only process - as part of the browse option.
When it comes to ‘putting’ the production files (*html code, image data, scripts etc) to the server, it will use ftp - because (I suppose) many web-sites are developed on clients which are not on a LAN with the web server.
You can use htdocs or another folder (a subfolder and define a virtual host like suzette did).
If you follow her footsteps in the section titled “A Working Website, www.swerdna.org” but change the names, it will work. And there’s a CGI bin config there too. Plus if you need them, server side includes. If you make your version of the folder “swerdna.org”, chown it over to your webmaster version of suzette. Then make it available via ftp/sftp/whatever (I use vsftpd – so easy).
Generally, I’m not having any problems following your tutorial - which has been a god-send for me (aside from having some age-related deep brain dysfunction which could not - would not - see the difference between ‘srv’ and ‘svr’; that took a whole day to spot). So I am able to get a crude page to show on any browser on any client on my home LAN.
To work up the real site I’ll need to use DW. Using a hand-coding tool like Quanta+ doesn’t meet my needs But I now see that DW cannot be used to either define or ‘populate’ the remote site, in Network mode, using windows-style shares (because, based on your red letters, I am most certainly not going to share the branch /svr/www/htdocs as you feared I might). So, having created the DocumentRoot for the web-site, following your tutorial, I will have to ‘put’ the site files using either the ftp functions in DW or, as you recommend, using vsftp.
Now comes the rub: surely this implies that I have to set uo my web-server as an ftp server too?
