Apache on RedHat Linux

Administration Questions

[mike123]

Hi All

I'm in the process of setting up a LAMP stack on RedHat Enterprise 3.0.
Why is the apache installation on redhat so different from other installations? i.e. I had previously seen everything installed somewhere like /usr/local/apache or in /opt/apache. On RH some files are in /var/www, some are in /etc.

Would it be a bad idea for me to try centralize everthing?
What about file ownership? Should the apache user own everything or should I leave the conf files with root?

Thanks
Mike

[sublime1]

Short answer: I have no idea why redhat did this -- I recently encountered the same issue when I needed to install a special version of MySQL and had to find all the various bits and pieces located in all sorts of places, like /var and /lib and /usr/bin and /etc/init.d and ... well all over the place. Fortunately on Unix, not much is embedded as references in files, so if you just clean up the main files you should be ok. Or, if you have installed a graphical UI, there's a RedHat tool similar to Windows' Add/Remove programs that will let you uninstall a package, which is probably the better way to go.

Call me crazy, but it seems simpler just to have the entire product installed in a single directory like /usr/local/apache :-)