Installation guide

198 Chapter 14. Apache HTTP Server
authuser
If authentication was required, this is the username with which the user identified herself. Usu-
ally, this is not used, so you will see a - in its place.
[date]
The date and time of the request.
"request"
The request string exactly as it came from the browser or client.
status
The HTTP status code which was returned to the browser or client.
bytes
The size of the document.
referer
This can give the URL of the webpage which linked to the the current request.
user-agent
This gives the name of the browser or client making the request.
14.5.42. ServerSignature
The ServerSignature directive adds a line containing the Apache server version and the Server-
Name of the serving host to any server-generated documents (for example, error messages sent back
to clients). ServerSignature is set to on by default. You can change it to off, so no signature line
will be added, or you can change it to EMail. EMail will add a mailto:ServerAdmin HTML tag
to the signature line.
14.5.43. Alias
The Alias setting allows directories to be outside the DocumentRoot directory and yet still acces-
sible to the Web server. Any URL ending in the alias will automatically resolve to the alias’ path. By
default, one alias is already set up. An icons directory can be accessed by the Web server, but the
directory is not in the DocumentRoot. The icons directory, an alias, is actually /var/www/icons/,
not /var/www/html/icons/.
14.5.44. ScriptAlias
The ScriptAlias setting defines where CGI scripts (or other types of scripts) can be found. Gener-
ally, you do not want to leave CGI scripts within the DocumentRoot. If CGI scripts are in Documen-
tRoot, they could potentially be viewed as text documents. Even if you do not care if people can see
and then use your CGI scripts, revealing how they work creates opportunities for unscrupulous people
to exploit any security holes in the script and may create a security risk for your server. By default,
the cgi-bin directory is a ScriptAlias of /cgi-bin/ and is actually located in /var/www/cgi-
bin/.
Your /var/www/cgi-bin directory has Options ExecCGI set, meaning that execution of CGI
scripts is permitted within that directory.