Hiding private documentation
By Paul Murphy, author of The Unix Guide to Defenestration
There are lots of legitimate reasons for wanting to use a web server as a communication hub for your work team without making its existence obvious to others. That means you do need to get management sign-off but don't want to put a big sign on the corporate intranet that says "click here for secret project".
Apache virtual hosting combines nicely with some standard Unix facilities to give you what you need -but talk it over with your boss first!
Lets assume you and your colleagues are all on Unix workstations of some kind and that you're going to host this on your Sun box.
First figure out how you're going to manage content and interaction. Personally I like using mySQL with phorum mainly because they meet three conditions: they work; they're free, and they're trivial to install and use, but there are lots of choices.
Secondly get your network manager to reserve a second static ip address for each workstation you plan to allow access to, including your host machine.
Then:
< deny all, allow from list_of_second_ips >
directive into the virtual host listing
"Listen xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:90"
to httpd.conf to bind the apache server
to the address and port you've chosen;
ifconfig hme0:1 plumb
ifconfig hme0:1 inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask 255.255.255.xxx up
And you're done. You now have an almost invisible project network that's very hard for outsiders to find their way into - and easy for you to manage simply by controlling the "allow from" list in httpd.conf.