virtualhosts usernames length

Question

We operated a dedicated server a while back, and every account had a "temporary link" that looked like this:

http://xx.xxx.xx.xxx/~sometext

~sometext was limited at 8 characters I believe.

We also have a resellers account with our hosting provider, and the account names for this look like this:

http://xx.xxx.xx.xxx/thedomainname.co.uk - but with no character limits.

I much prefer this style (even if just for aesthetic reasons).

Is there some kind of Apache module that allows for longer user names?

Hope I've been clear enough

Thanks.

Answer 1

Is there some kind of Apache module that allows for longer user names?

Apache (mod_userdir) does not intrinsically restrict the number of characters in the username. Constraints will be inherited from the underlying OS though - IIRC there was an old POSIX standard for 8 chars - check your limits.h file.

Hope I've been clear enough

Still some points I'm not getting.

You're asking bout virtualhosts - but the difference between the URLs is at the path level - not the vhost.

The '~' in the URL tells the webserver to use the mod_userdir mapping to find the files - but that's omited from the second example implying that the URL mapping has nothing to do with mod_userdir. This might simply be a directory name - or it might be re-written by mod_rewrite, or it may be a directory alias.