Apache is the most widely used HTTP-server in the world today. It surpasses all free and commercial competitors on the market, and provides a myriad of features; more than the nearest cmpetitor could give you on a UNIX variant. It is also the most used web server for a Linux system. A web server like Apache, in its simplest function, is software that displays and serves HTML pages hosted on a server to a client browser that understands the HTML code. Mixed with third party modules and programs, it can become powerful software, which will provide strong and useful services to a client browser.
I expect that most of the users that read this book will be especially interested in knowing how to install the Apache web server in the most secure, and optimized, way. In its base install, Apache is no more difficult to install then the other software we have installed on our Linux server. The process can become tricky when we want to add some third party modules or programs. There are a lot of possibilities, variants and options for installing Apache.
we have provided some step-by-step examples where you can see how to build Apache with other third-party modules and programs like mod_ssl, mod_perl, PHP4, LDAP connectivity, etc. Of course, the building of these programs is optional, and you are free to compile only what you want, i.e. you may want to compile Apache with support for PHP4, but without SSL or PostgreSQL database connectivity etc. To simplify matters we assume some prerequisites for each example. If these don’t fit your needs, simply modify the steps to suit your needs.
In this section, we explain and cover some of the basic ways in which you can adjust the configuration to improve the server’s performance. Also, for the interested, we’ll provide a procedure to be able to run Apache as a non root-user and in a chrooted environment for optimal security.
February 19, 2009 at 2:13 pm
very nice book with absolutely good hints….