Summary

The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) has propelled the Internet into the mainstream because Web browsers make it easy for users to browse documents stored on various Internet hosts. Whether you run a small business or manage computer systems and networks for a large company, chances are good that you have to set up and maintain a Web server. Because of its built-in networking support, a Red Hat Linux PC makes an affordable Web server. This chapter describes how to configure the Apache Web server on a Red Hat Linux PC.

By reading this chapter, you learned:

The Web is made possible by the standard format for documents and the standard protocol for transferring a document across the network. The document format is HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. The standard document exchange protocol is HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.
The Web has a client/server architecture, with Web servers providing the HTML documents (often referred to as Web pages) to Web-browser clients.
The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) syntax uniquely identifies Web pages and other network resources. A URL identifies the location of the document (machine name and directory), as well as the protocol to be used to transfer the document (such as HTTP or FTP).
Among Web servers, the most popular is the Apache Web server. You can install the Apache Web server during Red Hat Linux installation. This chapter describes the Apache Web server configuration files and some of the configuration directives.
The Apache Web server is also referred to as the Apache httpd server or simply httpd.
The main Apache httpd configuration file is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Other configuration files are located in the /etc/httpd/conf.d directory, and these configuration files have file names with the .conf extension.
You can install Apache Tomcat and the mod_jk connector to enable the Apache httpd server to run Java servlets (small Java applications that run on the server and usually provide access to databases or perform some computations and return a HTML document with the results). This chapter showed you the steps to install and configure Apache Tomcat with Apache httpd.
You can set up Apache for secure sockets layer (SSL) support by generating public-private key pair and obtaining a digital certificate signed by a certificate authority. This chapter showed you how to set up the secure server.