Other Servers and Web Security
I’ll finish the chapter with some brief notes about other servers used with or instead of Apache.
Web Servers
Apache has the largest market share, but it isn’t the only web server available for Linux. An organization that is more comfortable with commercial software might consider an Apache derivative like Covalent or an independent product like Zeus or iPlanet.
There are also some interesting open source alternatives.
tux
is a new open source web and FTP
server, developed by Ingo Molnar and others at Red Hat. It takes
advantage of improvements in recent (2.4+) Linux kernels to provide
an extremely fast server. (It set some benchmark records for
SPECWeb99 — as much as three times faster than Apache or IIS on
the same hardware). tux
can operate in user and
kernel space, serving static and dynamic content, with optional
caching. It can work in front of Apache or behind it, so you can
assign tasks to the appropriate server. The frontend server serves
port 80, and the back-end server serves port 8080 or another unused
value. Usually, tux
serves static content and
passes everything else to Apache.
tux
is still quite new, and little is yet known of
any specific security issues. The tux
manual
details the checks it makes before serving a file:
TUX only serves a file if:
The URL does not contain ?.
The URL does not start with /.
The URL points to a file that exists.
The file is world-readable.
The file is not a directory.
The file is not executable.
The file does not ...
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