Description:
------------
I've been trying unsuccessfully to start Personal Web Sharing on my Mac. When I click to start it, a pale check-mark is put in place and it says "Web sharing starting up", but it never darkens, and no ip number appears below the selection box. Eventually, the check-mark disappears. BTW when I put in a check-mark on the Services menu, it also appears, pale, on the Firewall menu. I have an 866 MHz Mac with 1.12Gb of RAM running 10.4.9. I am running behind a Netgear router, which should be all the firewall I need. I have tried the standard troubleshooting, such as repairing permissions, all check out okay.

This seemed at first to be a problem with OS 10.4.9  basic operating system, as I've tried to make a change on System Preferences:Sharing:Services, and the change can't be completed


Since then, I've learned a few things, but haven't resolved the problem yet. Here's what I've learned.

To bring you up to date, I installed PHP on a Mac (866, 1.2 GB RAM, OS 10.4.9). But apparently the install did not take. When I type httpd on the Terminal I get:

$ httpd
Processing config directory: /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf
Processing config file: /private/etc/httpd/users/+entropy-php.conf
Syntax error on line 8 of /private/etc/httpd/users/+entropy-php.conf:
Cannot load /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so into server: (reason unknown)


I believe I've found a resolution to my problem, if I can figure how to do it.

A user on the Apple support site had exactly the same problem as mine. If I could figure exactly what he did, I could be up and running.

Someone responded:

    In reply to:
    It's right there, although I don't know what is wrong with the file. Check line 8 of the +entropy-php.conf file, which I think is trying to load a library file, libphp5.so. See if the file exists in the path specified. If not, that could be the problem. If it is there, then there may be something wrong with the file. I check with the site where you got entropy from.


The Mac user wrote:

    In reply to:
    I am sure I am being totally stupid, but I can't find this file, nor do I have any idea where to look for it (other than just doing a straight search).
    I have no folders called usr, local, php5
    Is this some sort of invisible file?


and then
    In reply to:
    Since my last post I have found out how to use Terminal to make the
    invisible files visible in the finder and then delete all the PHP
    files altogether.
    A clean install from the Entropy site managed to get PHP to work in the end.


I asked other readers for more info, and got one response.

    In reply to:
    I'm not aware of any config options for that. "visibility" is an option in Spotlight. You can select "Go to Folder" in Spotlight's Go menu with visibility selected.
    As far as terminal goes, ls -a will display hidden files in the terminal window and you can judiciously use "rm" to get rid of some things. If you don't "su" to become superuser ( which you can't unless "Root user" is enabled ) you can't cause to much of a catastrophe with "rm".


Can anyone get me on the road to using these insights?

Rick


Reproduce code:
---------------
Processing config file: /private/etc/httpd/users/+entropy-php.conf
Syntax error on line 8 of /private/etc/httpd/users/+entropy-php.conf:
Cannot load /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so into server: (reason unknown)