The Apache Web Server So, in this section, we’ll show you how to set up a web server on your machine, configure it, and publish pages on it. From there, you’ll soon be developing your own sites. The Apache Web Server As we’ve mentioned, there are a number of commercial and freely available web servers in existence. Among the commercial web servers are offerings from Netscape, IPlanet, SunONE, Microsoft (the Internet Information Server, or IIS), and Zeus. Among the open source web servers, we can list Apache, thttpd, and Redhat TUX. Of all these, Apache is most widely used. At the time of writing, 66% of all web sites are hosted on Apache web servers (according to the Netcraft Web Server Survey, http://www.netcraft.com/survey) - the vast majority of them running on Linux or Unix operating systems. Apache’s popularity is due not only of its open source pedigree, but also to its highly competitive levels of performance, functionality, stability, flexibility, and security: Apache’s flexibility comes from the fact that it is a modular web server. That means that you can meet your requirements by plugging any number of external modules into the core httpd daemon. Of course, being open source software, you also have access to Apache’s source code, which you can customize to fit your needs. Apache is also very scalable. You can run Apache on high-end hardware, and it’s possible to increase the capacity of Apache web servers by sharing the load across any number of servers. It’s also very portable, being available for a number of operating systems. Apache’s security is very good in comparison to other web servers. Moreover, the Apache Foundation is extremely active in the continued defense of Apache from security problems - particularly in the form of announcements and patches. Apache performs very well - it boasts a highly optimized daemon for serving static content which dramatically outperforms its nearest rivals. Moreover, it rarely crashes and achieves extremely long up-times. Apache comes with detailed documentation, which helps to make the setup and configuration easy. And of course, because it’s so popular there’s a wide network of support for Apache, in the form of mailing lists, newsgroups, and commercial vendors like Red Hat. Apache development is active. The Apache Foundation is actively involved in development of new modules; new versions of Apache to make it reliable stable and secure. Since you’ve already got Red Hat Linux 9, there’s another good reason for choosing Apache as your web server software - it’s included as part of the Red Hat Linux 9 distribution! At the time of writing, the latest version of Apache is 2.0.44. Installing Apache As we’ve alredy noted, Apache is a modular server - the core server provides the basic functionality, with extended features available in various modules. This makes it very flexible and easy to configure, becuase you need to configure only the modules you need. So, it’s worth looking at how to control the installation and removal of these modules. In fact, the different modules are contained in the different packages that we can install via the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). Recall that to start RPM’s graphical interface, you can select Main Menu | System Settings | Add/Remove Applications, or type the following command at the command line: 271

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