I have no clue why the Debian Etch distribution is set up as you describe. I do remember discussion about the time /var/www was first used, long ago, about /var always being a read-write file system even if the others were mounted read-only from some other medium [CD-ROM, NFS, etc.]. This seemed to be at least part of the motivation. But I can't speak for Apache at all. -- /*********************************************************************\ ** ** Joe Yao jsdy@xxxxxxx - Joseph S. D. Yao ** \*********************************************************************/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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