Chapter 26. Configuring a Web Server
| IN THIS CHAPTER
Whether email or the Web is the true "killer app" of the modern Internet is really a toss-up these days. Although email, the venerable workhorse of online applications, has quietly changed the way we communicate forever, there isn't anything quite like the flash of the Web and its potential as a full-fledged entertainment and commerce medium. In any case, it's probably pretty safe to assume that if you're setting up a FreeBSD server, you want it to be a web server as well as providing email and shell access. This isn't universally the case, though, so whereas FreeBSD ships with Sendmail installed to do email services with almost no additional configuration, there is no equivalent web server application installed by default. You have to get your own from the ports or packages. For 90 percent of web server functions, Apache is the server of choice. There are a number of other servers you can use instead, such as Roxen and AOLserver, but Apache has slowly built up so much of the market share in polled Internet servers over the years that it's the leading choice by a wide margin. The Apache Project, located at http://www.apache.org on the Web, is one of the best examples of the open-source philosophy at work, producing software that gets the job done better and in more compliance with published standards than just about all the alternatives. It's also suitable for all kinds of environmentsfrom small, low-traffic informational or hobbyist websites or personal blogs to full-scale e-commerce sites with hundreds of concurrent connectionswith the addition of plug-in modules allowing you to take advantage of such server-side technologies as database connectivity and built-in Perl scripting. This chapter will discuss how to configure Apache for each of these types of installations. First, however, we will look at the structure of the HTTP protocol and see how a thorough understanding of it will enable you to operate an efficient Internet server. |
