Setting up Web Servers

Web servers have become a critical element in any organization’s network. They can be small enough to host a website on a home PC or a company’s intranet website, or large enough to handle many corporate websites or e-commerce stores. Therefore, configuring a Web server properly is crucial for the proper functioning of any website. Though there are lots of Web servers, three names stand out–Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), and Netscape FastTrack Server. 

We will talk about using these Web servers under various scenarios in our forthcoming issues, starting with how to set up Apache on Linux and Netscape FastTrack Server on NetWare 5.0 in this issue. 

Apache for Linux 

This Web server is Open Source, freely downloadable and distributable. (You’ll find Apache Web server version 1.3.12-2 in our Red Hat Linux 6.2 distribution in June 2000.) While installing Linux, if you opt for a server installation, Apache will get installed. If you opt for a custom installation, you must select the Web server package when you are asked to customize the installation packages. You can also install it any time after your Linux system is up and running using its

RPMs.

Installation from RPM 

You can check whether Apache has already been installed, by issuing the following command.

rpm —qa | grep apache

If you don’t get any output, then you must install the RPM from

PCQuest’s June 2000 CD. Mount the CD and change to the directory RedHat/RPMS and issue the following

command.

rpm —ivh apache*

This will install Apache Web server, its documentation, and its development package. The development package is required to build dynamic modules called DSO (Dynamic Shared Objects) for Apache like the PHP and Tomcat for Java Server Pages. You can also download the latest version (1.3.19) of Apache. The RPMs can be downloaded from

http://httpd.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/linux. 

For the sake of consistency, we will use the RPMs from PCQuest’s Red Hat 6.2 CD, the installation for which has been already explained. 

Starting and stopping the Web server 

You can check whether Apache is running by issuing the following command.






/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd status


If you see an output as





httpd (pid ) is running …..

it means the Web server is running. If you get an output saying ‘httpd is stopped’ then it means that Apache is not running. Subsequently, you can start Apache as:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start

If you want Apache to run on subsequent reboots, then issue the following command.

ntsysv

From among the number of services displayed, make sure that the ‘httpd’ service is selected. At times you may need to stop the server and start it again, like when you make some changes in the Apache configuration files. This can be done as

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd stop



/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd start


or a shortcut way to do this is

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

Apache in action 

To check whether Apache Web server is up and ready, fire up a Web browser like Lynx or Netscape Navigator on the Linux machine and key in the following URL.

http://127.0.0.1

You will be able to see the Web page as shown in the accompanying picture. In case the Linux

machine is on a network then you can see the same page on the network from a Windows machine, using Internet Explorer. Use the following URL.

http://

If you are running a DNS server on your network, you can substitute the IP address with the name of the Linux machine. 

The Web page shown is an HTML page named index.html in the directory /home/httpd/html. This directory is by default the ‘document root’ of Apache Web server. A document root is a directory where the Web server looks for files on request from a Web browser. By default Apache is configured to serve the index.html file for the URL http://. 

Netscape FastTrack server for NetWare 

Netscape has a Web server designed to run on NetWare. It comes bundled with NetWare 5.0. In this article we will see how to set up FastTrack Web server on Novell Netware 5.1 and 5.0. With 5.1, the Web server is a built-in module and thus gets installed with the OS itself. If you are running NetWare 5.0, you need to install the Web server separately. Prior to the actual install, make sure that you have set up TCP/IP protocol on the NetWare server. Otherwise, you can fire up the inetcfg utility on the NetWare console and set up the TCP/IP from there.

Installation 

The FastTrack server can be installed on the NetWare server from a client machine. For this, log on to your NetWare network as admin. Insert the NetWare 5 OS CD, and go to the directory \\products\webserv. Here you’ll find a single setup.exe file 27.7 MB in size. When you run the setup, you’ll be prompted to enter the NetWare server’s destination drive. Here you have to enter the drive letter mapped to the SYS: volume of your NetWare server. This is f:\ in the default installation of NetWare. Then specify the host name or IP address of the NetWare server.

Next you have to set a username and password for Web server administration. You can leave the HTTP port to the default port when asked, that is, port 80. You’ll then need to specify a port for administration. After copying the necessary files to the server, it will ask whether you want to change the startup script, which is autoexec.ncf. This script is used to start the Web server automatically when the NetWare machine starts. 

If the installation is successful, you’ll see it in action by keying in the IP address of your NetWare server in any Web browser. 

Shekhar Govindarajan and Sanjay Majumder