Situation

I want to have ‘rsync’ run when a user presses a button on the webserver. The software stack is as follows (though this was largely a red-herring, see below) :

Fedora – server

lighttpd – webserver

Twiki – intranet setup

perl – plugin language for Twiki

bash – perl launches a script to run the rsync

sudo – to ‘change [...]

Roundcube is a beautiful IMAP webmail client. In order to integrate is properly with an enterprise TWiki installation, ’single authentication’ needed to be implemented – so that the sign-on for TWiki (which is htpasswd style authenticated by lighttpd) can be used for the roundcube authentication seamlessly.
Since the TWiki login/passwords are different from the IMAP [...]

Using twiki with lighttpd is not yet as simple as it should be. One particular problem is that twiki writes out htpasswd files that lighttpd doesn’t parse correctly (twiki includes an unnecessary ‘:$email’ entry).
To fix the problem (so that users can manage their own passwords) here’s a quick fix for {twiki}/lib/TWiki/Users/HtPasswdUser.pm :
sub _dumpPasswd { [...]

So that I could continue developing the ‘Trading Account Management’ system while on the road, the installation of lighttpd/database had to be secured. In particular, sqlite had to be used rather than mysql, since the data in the database itself was critical to the business (and there was no time to conjure up ‘fake [...]

yum install mysql-server lighttpd php php-mysql phpMyAdmin
This puts the phpMyAdmin install in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin.
Add a new configuration file called /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd-phpMyAdmin.conf :# server.bind = “phpmyadmin.example.com” # If there isn’t a server.bind already
# Ensure the modules we need are loaded inserver.modules += ( “mod_cgi” )# server.modules += ( “mod_alias”, “mod_cgi” )
$HTTP["host"] == [...]

Add a lighttpd configuration file in /etc/lighttpd/conf.d/lighttpd-myth.conf (where my machine hostname is ‘americas’ on the local network) :#! /bin/bash # Just for SciTE language hint
$HTTP["host"] == “myth.americas” { var.root=”/var/www/html/mythweb” server.document-root = var.root
url.rewrite [...]