Web Server

    A web server is a software required to host and run web applications. These applications are basically web pages that are stored on the server. The most important thing about the web server is its ability to service multiple requests. There are many web server software available today, the most widely used ones being IIS (Internet Information Server ) ,Tom Cat and Apache. 

    The loading and configuring of an Apache web server on a Linux machine was tried and the details are as under.

    Source.    The Apache web server comes in may forms that is in binary form for easy loading on specific hardware and Linux type or it can be down loaded in its source form where it will be compiled and loaded on the target machine.  The size of the source is about two hundred  MB and require a stable connection to down load. 

Setup.

    The Apache binary were downloaded and installed 

                #rpm -ivh httpd-2.0.40-11.i386.rpm

    To start the Apache Web Server 

                #apachect1 start

        This command starts the web server with the default settings . Now we use the Apache Webmin a web server configuration tool to configure the server. Once the web page for the wenmin has been opened in a browser scroll to the bottom of the page and add a new virtual host by supplying the IP address and the directory where the html files for the site are stored. After filling the details click on the Create button and the new virtual server is setup. We can create multiple Virtual Servers with different IP or same Ip and different port number on the same machines. 

Testing:

   To test the web server open a browser window and point it to the IP address of the machine here we had the web server and the client on the same machine so the local machine loop back ip was used ie 

                   http://127.0.0.1

    Now if the configuration is correct we see the Apache Web Server welcome page. Next we can spesify the directory and file to see.