Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 22 LEOPARD AS A WEB SERVER
Before you can actually load a user’s personal home page, you must activate web sharing
from the Sharing preference pane, in System Preferences, as shown in Figure 22-2. This is
extremely simple: just check the Web Sharing box. There are no options.
Figure 22-2. Activating web sharing from System Preferences
CAUTION Turning on web sharing is an all-or-nothing proposition. If you turn web sharing on
for one account, it will be on for all accounts. To change this behavior, see the “Configuring
Apache” section, which follows.
Accessing Your Site
Your local web server is accessed like any other web server—that is to say, by IP address. You can
use the standard loopback address, 127.0.0.1, but if another user on your network were to try to
access your site at 127.0.0.1, they would get their own machine.
If you’d like to view your page from other computers on your local network, you can use
the .local address, which you can assign from the Sharing pane. However, this depends on
machines resolving DNS via multicast, so it might not work, depending on the configuration of
your network.
If nothing else, you can access your machine by its local IP address. To determine your
IP address, open the Networking pane of System Preferences, and then select the appropriate
network interface from the list on the left. The status will list your IP address, as shown in Figure
22-3. You can get the same information from the Info tab of Network Utility.