About the Apache Web Server
| Apache is the most widely used web server on the Internet today, according to a Netcraft survey of active websites in January 2005, which is shown in Table 21.1.
Note that these statistics do not reflect Apache's use on internal networks, known as intranets. The name Apache appeared during the early development of the software because it was "a patchy" server, made up of patches for the freely available source code of the NCSA HTTPd web server. For a while after the NCSA HTTPd project was discontinued, a number of people wrote a variety of patches for the code, to either fix bugs or add features they wanted. A lot of this code was floating around and people were freely sharing it, but it was completely unmanaged. After a while, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick set up a centralized repository of these patches, and the Apache project was born. The project is still composed of a small core group of programmers, but anyone is welcome to submit patches to the group for possible inclusion in the code. There's been a surge of interest in the Apache project over the past several years, partially buoyed by a new interest in open source on the part of enterprise-level information services. It's also due in part to crippling security flaws found in Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS); the existence of malicious web task exploits; and operating system and networking vulnerabilities to the now-infamous Code Red, Blaster, and Nimda worms. IBM made an early commitment to support and use Apache as the basis for its web offerings and has dedicated substantial resources to the project because it makes more sense to use an established, proven web server. In mid-1999, The Apache Software Foundation was incorporated as a nonprofit company. A board of directors, elected on an annual basis by the ASF members, oversees the company. This company provides a foundation for several open-source software development projects, including the Apache Web Server project. The best places to find out about Apache are the Apache Software Foundation's website, http://www.apache.org/, and the Apache Week website, http://www.apacheweek.com/, where you can subscribe to receive Apache Week by email to keep up on the latest developments in the project, keep abreast of security advisories, and research bug fixes. Tip You'll find an overview of Apache in the Apache Software Foundation's frequently asked questions (FAQs) at http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/faq/. In addition to extensive online documentation, you can also find the complete documentation for Apache in the HTML directory of your Apache server. You can access this documentation by looking at http://localhost/manual/index.html on your new Fedora system with one of the web browsers included on your system. You'll need to have Apache running on your system! Fedora ships with Apache 2.0, and the server (named httpd) is included on this book's CD-ROMs and DVD. You can obtain the latest version of Apache as an RPM installation file from a Fedora FTP server; upgrade using up2date, yum, or apt-get; or get the source code from the Apache website and, in true Linux tradition, build it for yourself. To determine the version of Apache included with your system, use the web server's -V command-line option like this: $ /usr/sbin/httpd -V | cat Server version: Apache/2.0.50 Server built: Jun 29 2004 11:11:55 Server's Module Magic Number: 20020903:8 Architecture: 32-bit Server compiled with.... The output displays the version number, build date and time, platform, and various options used during the build. You can use the -v option to see terser version information. Tip In the previous command, we piped to the cat command because your machine might have SELinux configured to stop Apache writing to the terminal. |
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