Fedora™ 7 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Bible

Chapter 21. Setting Up a Web Server

In This Chapter

• Introduction to Web servers

• Quick starting the Apache Web server

• Configuring the Apache Web server

• Starting and stopping the server

• Monitoring server activities

Approximately 60 percent of all Web sites today are powered by the open source Apache Web Server Project (compared to about 31 percent for Microsoft Web servers). In mid 2007, Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) received responses from more than 66 million sites that were running Apache. As registration of Internet domain names continues to grow at an average rate of more than 1 million a month, Apache is getting the lion's share of new Web sites being launched.

The Web has also been a boon to organizations seeking an inexpensive means to publish and distribute information. Using the Fedora Linux distribution that comes with this book or RHEL, you can launch your own Web site using software available from the Apache project. Combine your own domain name, Internet connection, and Fedora or RHEL to create your own presence on the World Wide Web.

This chapter shows you how to install and configure the Apache Web server. Each of the server's configuration files is described and explained in detail. You learn about various options for starting and stopping the server, as well as how to monitor the activity of a Web server. Related security concerns and practices are addressed throughout the chapter in the descriptions and examples, as well as in a special Web server security section ("Protecting ...