You may be absolutely right here, Eric. Indeed, I hope you ARE right. That's exactly what I have begun to suspect. When I couldn't find anyone in the Debian world who could explain why I shouldn't change DocumentRoot on individual sites when I needed to, I began to suspect I had overreacted to the original comment (and taken it too seriously). In short I started to think perhaps there was no good reason. That's why I joined the Apache Users list to ask. I figured if ANYONE knows a good reason you guys will. ;) Thanks for the direct feedback, Eric. So far, that's two votes that suggest it really doesn't matter. -----Original Message----- From: Eric Covener [mailto:covener@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 2:43 PM To: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; gregplatt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Why do I need /var/www as DocumentRoot & www-data as www owner? On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Greg Platt - Platt Consultants <GregPlatt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I remember someone mentioning in a post I made weeks ago that the ownerships > and permissions on my web directories seemed odd. His remarks suggested he > thought all web directories ought to be owned by www-data and have > permissions of 755. Generally your webserver (www-data) userid shouldn't own the content it's serving (or the directory it lives in) I think you're taking the packaging decisions of various distributions to heart a little too much. You should be able to quite easily change a DocumentRoot as you move from host to host. -- Eric Covener covener@xxxxxxxxx --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx