I am trying to run mutiple zope instances from the same software base. Poking around in the code, I discovered two (undocumented) environment variables: SOFTWARE_HOME and INSTANCE_HOME. I set INSTANCE_HOME to the directory above my alternate var directory, and immediately discovered that I needed to copy the 'access' file to that directory. After I copied that across, I got the server to run, and everything *seems* fine. My Questions: Did I miss anything? Has anyone else tried to do this? Right now, I am using the same products and extensions for all of the zopes, but I can see a future need (virtual hosting) to have both shared and non-shared product folders. Here is a simple proposal for a directory hierarchy (based loosely on FHS 2.0 (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/)): shared files: /opt/zope/share/doc bundled Zope documentation /opt/zope/share/lib Zope python files, and shared products /opt/zope/share/src source files for /opt/zope/share/lib and /opt/zope/<arch>/lib /opt/zope/share/etc.in sample configuration files for /opt/zope/host/etc /opt/zope/share/var.in initial site database and other files architecture-specific files: /opt/zope/<arch>/lib .pyd or .so files host-specific config files: /opt/zope/host/etc or maybe /etc/opt/zope (for example: where is the python interpreter?) private files for each site: /opt/zope/<site-name>/lib probably just Products/ and Extensions/ (and maybe Import/?) /opt/zope/<site-name>/etc "access" maybe an rc file that specifies ports, services, and data stores (rather than assuming "Data.fs" and "FileStorage". This will be a bigger issue with ZEO.) Zope stores most of its 'configuration' in ZODB, but this would be the place for start-up configuration. /opt/zope/<site-name>/var Data.fs, Export/ these could also be moved into the /home hierarchy, like /home/ftp and /home/httpd Questions: Why are ZServer and PCGI not in the lib directory? Is there a problem with putting the dynamic libraries into a separate folder from the related .pyc files? p.s. I have not actually installed Zope on Linux yet, but the directory structure of the tarball looks identical to the MSWindows release.