[Zope] Virtual hosting changes

[Terry Hancock]

I've been for some time using a "hacked" version of virtual host monster 
that was maintained by my hosting company, and I've just moved to a new 
hosting service
with just the "stock" version.  My impression was that the hack was 
mostly cosmetic (just sweetened the interface a little by giving you 
separate form-fields etc).

But what bothers me is this note on the VHM page:
"""
You should only use the "Mappings" tab for simple virtual hosting, in a 
Zope that is serving requests directly. Each mapping line is a host name 
followed by a path to a Folder. The VHM checks the host specified in 
each incoming request to see if it is in the list. If it is, then the 
corresponding path is inserted at the start of the path, followed by 
"VirtualHostRoot".
"""

WHAT!?  Why?

I hate messing with anything under /etc/apache2, and I strongly hope to 
mess with it now, get it right, and then forget about it (last time I 
left it for about 5 years). But I used to reconfigure VHM quite 
frequently (say every 4-6 months) to manage new sub-domains, etc, and 
VHM made it easy.

Is this warning just because the author expects me to like the Apache 
interface better or is there some deeper security or performance reason 
why I wouldn't want to use VHM more or less as I have been?

The real downside of course, is that if using VHM to manage sub-domains 
behind
an Apache proxy is "deprecated" then I'm going to have a hard time 
finding the
right documentation to set Apache up right (so far, I'm just trying to 
port my
old settings -- but the old machine was FreeBSD and the new one is 
Debian Linux,
so Apache's config files are laid out quite differently as are the 
filesystem paths
I need to use and the default settings for Apache (and in general, I 
trust Debian's
choices better, so I'm trying to keep this fairly minimal if I can).

Thanks for any comments.

Cheers,
Terry