Got myself into a pickle with vhosts, permissions (again)

[ColinD]

Hi guys,

Ok a bit of background, I'm looking to help out my webserver, dual xeon 3 with 2Gig of Ram, basically begin to migrate sites from apache. I host a couple of small sites with about a 20k userbase; thankfully not all on at once. I have a demo of zeus to redo as well, but I really prefer your price points and knowing that ruby works for some already.
Incidentally I came to litespeed via this article:
http://www.railtie.net/articles/2006...speed-of-light

while seeking alternatives to the apache fastcgi nightmare.

I've had a good search and found a nice thread about doing checks with sudo -u nobody ls /<path to vhost root> and I can see the directories, but alas the admin panel thinks differently.

No joy using directories outside of litetspeed so I swicthed to along side the DEFAULT folder. Some joy there, but I still had to manually create the conf.xml; despite eventually setting that directory to nobody.nobody and 777.

Now I'm not a great linux admin, I get by but I'm confused at the moment and I'm hoping somebody can shed some light on this for me in a clear way.

I have multiple virtual hosts under apache, each (cpanel) in there own direcotry. eg

/home/user1
/home/user2

Each user dir is made up of various dir's importantly a public_html and a symlnk to www.

public_html is set to user1.nobody and so for each user and apache is set to run as nobody.

Now what I am trying to ultimately do is configure some of these accounts for ruby on rails. A typical ROR directory structure within the users home would be
/home/user1/railsapp

Within that is a config, public and logs dir. Ideally I would like to point the vhost directly to the railsroot picking up on config folder and public. so using /home/user1/railsapp as the vhost root and the config set as $VH_ROOT/config/VH_conf.xml

Now I've tried a number of combinations and gone back to the default apache folders, alas no joy in getting past hte *path does not exist and please create messages. I'm confused as apache is serving from these pages usign the .nobody ideas.

I know I must be doing somthing daft; it's late here, but can somebody attempt to explain using the above data how / what I need to check / do. I hope I have made some sense and justified my question to you.

Thanks for reading.

Colin.

/as a foot note, the directories already exist.
/I'm the only shell user and I've just read about lsws not serving static files which are executable, alas I'm not that far yet, but one to remember.