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A WebServer Guide -- Help Using Apache

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-- This is one instance where you don\'t necessarily get what you pay for.

Where does Apache live?

Apache is maintained by the

Apache Software Foundation\'s Apache Server Project at

http://www.apache.org.

Apache

Web Server

The Apache Web server, for

those of you who haven\'t heard of it, is arguably the most popular Web server

in use on the Internet today. While Microsoft contends that its Internet

Information Server (IIS) is making huge gains, it\'s still struggling in many

ways against Apache. Why?

For starters, you don\'t have

to be running Windows to run Apache. It was first developed on the various

Unix/Linux/BSD platforms, then recently ported to

Win32. Internet Information Server, while a very good Web server on the NT

platform, is trapped in the \"Windows-only\" world. While IIS has many handy

features, not everyone wants to run NT for their Web server\'s OS.

Another reason for Apache\'s

widespread acceptance is its overall stability. While you can slow down an

Apache Web server (especially if you run tons of PERL/CGI scripts on it), you

can rarely, if ever, kill one. The Apache Web server service is near

bombproof.

Lastly, it\'s relatively

fast. I say \"relatively\" as it\'s relative to what you\'re doing with it. If

you\'re hosting a Web site with mostly static content, Apache is a fireball. If

you throw tons of CGI scripts at it, while making database calls at the same

time, you\'re going to slow it down. Though much of the slowdown will come from

your scripts themselves, and not Apache.

This article is going to

cover the basics of Apache configuration on Red Hat Linux 6.x-7.1, but fear

not; most of the Apache configuration features are cross platform. That means

that if you make a modification to Apache on Linux, that same modification, or

one extremely similar, is available on other various flavors of Linux using

the same syntax!

Getting

Apache

Apache is available from

http://www.apache.org. While you\'re

downloading the Apache package that\'s appropriate for your Operating System,

be sure to grab the documentation.

If you\'re a Linux user, the

odds are in your favor that Apache has been pre-installed. With the exception