I work as a system administrator at a company in Amsterdam. Today, one of the webservers needed to be updated. The system, based on Debian 3.1, had not been updated for a while.

Using apt-get update/ upgrade the process was completed within a couple of minutes. Unfortunately some parts of Apache2 and the php library did not updated well. Old configs were in place. etc. These old configs are important because of the htaccess usage of some websites and had to be reconfigured by hand.

Apache 2.2 has a new defined usage for VirtualHost. Apache now works with both VirtualHost and VirtualNameHost. A VirtualNameHost has to be defined before VirtualHost can be used. By adding a config file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf with the appropriate VirtualNameHosts Apache is able to find it’s hosts again.

There had been a change in the behavior of htaccess as well. By adding ‘AuthBasicAuthoritative Off’ to .htaccess in the folder problems were solved.