Thursday, March 29, 2012

Ubuntu on Lion under VirtualBox (3)

So far, we've been pretty self-serving :)
The next step is to serve pages to the host as well. We first need to modify two different files so that we can listen and send to port 8080. These files are:

/etc/apache2/ports.conf
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default


The edit to the first file adds two lines as shown by the diff. We save a copy before doing anything, in case we need a reference later:

telliott@U32:~$ sudo cp /etc/apache2/ports.conf /etc/apache2/ports.conf.orig
telliott@U32:~$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf
telliott@U32:~$ diff /etc/apache2/ports.conf /etc/apache2/ports.conf.orig
11,13d10
< NameVirtualHost *:8080
< Listen 8080
< 

The edit to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default is to duplicate the entire text of the file, then change the first line of the second half to read:

<VirtualHost *:8080>

Normally I'd think about using cat to do this, but because this file is owned by root, the OS won't allow it. I did this to open the file in nano:

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo nano default


With the cursor at the beginning of the file, mark the spot with OPT-A, then move the cursor to the end of the file and do in succession CTL-K (the text will disappear but don't worry), then CTL-U followed by CTL-U again. Make the edit described above, then save the file.

Now our tests from before should work even if we specify the new port.