[Setup] Solved: Apache Rewrite Rules on (Mac) Tiger Server

[Juliann]

Sometime during the upgrade of Plone.org the How-To about hosting on  
MacOSX disapeared (the url is there but no data exists, only the  
comments).  The section about interacting with Apache and the Server  
Admin Tools was not correct, at least not for Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger)  
Server.  I spent four days (4+ hours per day) trying all of the  
advice on every website, discussion board and list I could pester.   
Thanks to those from these lists who helped.  In the end, it took a  
little bit of everything to get it to work.

I have multiple Zope instances, each with multiple Plone sites.

What I did:

Created the virtual host files in the Server Admin (GUI) Tool. Just  
leave all of the information as the default except host name and  
alias (if needed).  I did change the contact email and I turned off  
Performance Caching, but the latter I may turn back on.  (With  
caching turned on it kept looking for port 16080 and failing, an  
error I haven't time to track down right now and something affecting  
everything on my server so we have it turned off across the board.)

I then went into the sites/sitename.conf files created by the GUI and  
modified each file to read as thus (substitute your zope server port  
for 8284):
_______________________
## Plone Site

<VirtualHost *:80>
         ServerName www.sitename.com
         ServerAdmin webmaster at sitename.com
##    DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
         DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
         CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/access_log" "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" % 
 >s %b"
         ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/error_log"
         ErrorDocument 404 /error.html
         <IfModule mod_ssl.c>
                 SSLEngine Off
                 SSLLog "/var/log/httpd/ssl_engine_log"
                 SSLCertificateFile "/etc/certificates/Default.crt"
                 SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/certificates/Default.key"
                 SSLCipherSuite "ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:! 
SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL"
         </IfModule>
         <IfModule mod_dav.c>
                 DAVLockDB "/var/run/davlocks/.davlock100"
                 DAVMinTimeout 600
         </IfModule>
##    <Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
##            Options All -Indexes -ExecCGI -Includes +MultiViews
##            AllowOverride None
##            <IfModule mod_dav.c>
##                    DAV Off
##            </IfModule>
##    </Directory>
         <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
                 RewriteEngine On
##            RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE                			
                 RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://localhost:8284/ 
VirtualHostBase/http/www.sitename.com:80/Plonesite/VirtualHostRoot/$1  
[L,P]
         </IfModule>
         <IfModule mod_alias.c>
         </IfModule>
         LogLevel warn
</VirtualHost>
_______________

I cannot claim that  this is best practice, but I can say that it  
works. (Knock on wood!)  But as Apple seem to muddle with their  
version of Apache with every major OS release this will probably  
break when 10.5 comes out :P

Thanks again to all who helped.  I hope that by posting I can spare  
others some wasted time.  However, I know that others have said that  
they had far less hassle getting their configs working, so there may  
be a simpler option out there.  I just couldn't find it.

With great relief,
--Juliann