Putty is not an editor, but a communications client program to establish a telnet or ssh connection to a target server system. That seemed to work fine, as you reached the bash shell of your system.

From within the bash you now may use an editor (like pico) to open the the file:
`pico /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf`

Before starting that editor, make sure to make yourself familiar how to use it (and how to safely exit and quit).

After having changed the httpd config file, you need to reload or restart the apache server.

However, if you are unsure about basics like this, you should be very careful when changing config files on your system. It is very easy to screw things up.

While you probably won't need to hire someone to make just this small change in a config text file, you should think about hiring a system administrator to take care of all the other basic stuff.

Kind regards,
R.

You might also consider using .htaccess instead of httpd.conf for now. .htaccess is generally accessible using FTP, allowing you to upload and download modified versions for testing, and the effects of errors are far easier to fix.

Jim

You should look for a list of basic Linux/Unix commands - this will help you get around via the command line. I would be very careful about editing httpd.conf without careful backups and serious testing.

If you want to try out at least opening the file, you can start by changing into the correct directory:

cd /usr/local/apache/conf/

(cd means change directory)

First step is to make a backup of the file you want to edit:

cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.bak

(cp means copy)

Then use the pico program (pico is a good simple text editor) to view the file:

pico httpd.conf

Control + O to save the file, Control + X to exit.

If you make a change, then you must restart Apache for it to take effect. The command can differ accross different versions, but usually it is:

apachectl restart

If the restart fails, you can always revert back to your old version:

mv httpd.conf httpd.conf.broken
mv httpd.conf.bak httpd.conf
apachectl restart

(mv means move, so in the above you use move to rename the broken httpd.conf file and then move the .bak file to replace the broken one)

Here's a few basic guides about the command line:

[infohost.nmt.edu...]
[andrsn.stanford.edu...]

I would strongly recommend getting an old machine (it doesn't need to be powerful or modern) and installing Linux on it for testing. Ideally you should install the same distribution of Linux as your hosting company as each distro can vary in subtle ways. In this way, you can get to know how Linux works without risking messing up your main server. It is useful too to have such a machine as a local test server!