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Server security Proxy CGI Microsoft Personal Web Server Cheap Web hosting with SSH access  Humor Etc

The smallest web server available is probably nweb  which is only 200 lines of C code (static pages only). HTTP::Server::Simple  is a simple webs server written in Perl. It has  no non-core module dependencies. It's suitable for building a standalone HTTP-based UI to your existing tools. for Python there is Python Community Server

Windows XP Professional contains Internet Information Services (IIS) version 5.1. IIS 5.1 includes Web and FTP server support, as well as support for Microsoft FrontPage transactions, Active Server Pages, and database connections. Available as an optional component, IIS 5.1 is installed automatically if you upgrade from versions of Windows with PWS installed.

PWS 4.0 is included with the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack and was designed for Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or later. PWS is not supported and cannot be installed on any version of Windows XP.

NOTE: Microsoft FrontPage 2002 can use disk-based Web pages in Windows XP Home Edition as an alternative.

Notes:
  • This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be expected.
  • The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree... Please try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link (see HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate if you can mail us a correct link.
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Old News

[Nov 19, 2009] nweb a tiny, safe Web server (static pages only)

See also micro_httpd  which implements all the basic features of an HTTP server in only 150 lines of code.
Have you ever wanted to run a tiny, safe Web server without worrying about using a fully blown Web server that could cause security issues? Do you wonder how to write a program that accepts incoming messages with a network socket? Have you ever just wanted your own Web server to experiment and learn with?

Well, look no further -- nweb is what you need. This is a simple Web server that has only 200 lines of C source code. It runs as a regular user and can't run any server-side scripts or programs, so it can't open up any special privileges or security holes.

This article covers:

nweb only transmits the following types of files to the browser :

If your favorite static file type is not in this list, you can simply add it in the source code and recompile to allow it.

[Nov 18, 2009] nginx by Igor Sysoev

nginx [engine x] is a HTTP server and mail proxy server written by me (Igor Sysoev).

nginx has been running for more than five years on many heavily loaded Russian sites including Rambler (RamblerMedia.com).
In March 2007 about 20% of all Russian virtual hosts were served or proxied by nginx.
According to Google Online Security Blog in June 2007 ago nginx served or proxied about 4% of all Internet virtual hosts.
2 of Alexa US Top100 sites use nginx in March 2008.
According to Netcraft in December 2008 nginx served or proxied 3.5 millions virtual hosts. And now it is on 3rd place (not counting in-house Google server) and ahead of lighttpd.
According to Netcraft in March 2009 nginx served or proxied 3.06% busiest sites.
According to Netcraft in May 2009 nginx served or proxied 3.25% busiest sites.
Here are some of success stories: FastMail.FM, Wordpress.com.

Security patches:

 

Development versions are nginx-0.8.27, nginx/Windows-0.8.27, the change log.
The latest stable versions are nginx-0.7.64, nginx/Windows-0.7.64, the change log.
The latest legacy stable version is nginx-0.6.39, the change log.
The latest legacy version is nginx-0.5.38, the change log.
The sources are licensed under 2-clause BSD-like license.

English Resources:

The Russian documentation.

Basic HTTP features:

 

Mail proxy server features:

 

Tested OS and platforms:

Architecture and scalability:

 

Other HTTP features:

Experimental features:

 

[Jul 16, 2008] httping 1.2.9  by Folkert van Heusden

About: httping is a "ping"-like tool for HTTP requests. Give it a URL and it will show how long it takes to connect, send a request, and retrieve the reply (only the headers). It can be used for monitoring or statistical purposes (measuring latency).

Changes: Binding to an adapter did not work and "SIGPIPE" was not handled correctly. Both of these problems were fixed.

[Feb 15, 2008] nginx 0.5.35 (Stable)  by nuut

About: nginx is an HTTP server and mail proxy server. It has been running for more than two years on many heavily loaded Russian sites, including Rambler (RamblerMedia.com). In March 2007, about 20% of all Russian virtual hosts were served or proxied by nginx.

Changes: The STARTTLS in SMTP mode is now working. In HTTPS mode, some requests fail with a "bad write retry" error. The "If-Range" request header line is now supported. uname(2) is now used on Linux systems instead of procfs.

[Nov 25, 2006] David's blog/FastCGI becoming the new leader in server technologies?

Until now FastCGI was behind mod_php, java and mod_perl in terms of popularity among web server administrators and web developers. But times have changed and changed for good.

In the early days of web development when the CGI interface was the leader and web servers were quite slow, developers felt that they needed a faster server technology, that can be used to run their web applications on high-traffic web sites. The solution to the problem seemed obvious – the developers had to take their CGI-based code and put it into the web server process.

With this solution, the operating system didn’t have to start a new process every time a request had been received, which is very expensive, and you could write your application with a persistent functionality in mind and ability to cache data between several different http requests.

These were the days when some of the most popular web server APIs were born – Internet Information Server’s ISAPI, Netscape Server’s NSAPI, and Apache’s module API. This trend created some of the best known and quite often used technologies in web development like mod_php, mod_python, java servlets (and later jsp), asp. But the conception that stays behind these technologies is not flawless. There are many problems with applications that run inside your average web server.

For example mod_perl’s high memory usage per child process can suck the available ram, php’s problems with threads can kill the whole web server, and many security problems arising from the fact that the most popular web server (Apache) can’t do simple things like changing the OS user it executes the request with. For quite some time there have been solutions, like putting a light-weight proxy server in front of apache, installing third-parity software for IIS or using php’s safe mode and OpenBasedir (Oh GOD!) on apache, but these are not elegant and pose other problems on their own. Also the hardware progress in the last few years made the server modules obsolete.

In the mean time, when the server modules were gaining glory and fame, a little-known technology with a different conception and implementation was born. It was called FastCGI and the basic problem it was designed to solve was to make CGI programs run faster. Later, it became clear that FastCGI solves many other problems and design flaws that the server modules had.

How FastCGI works?
FastCGI runs in the web server process, but doesn’t handle the request itself. Instead it manages a pool of the so-called FastCGI servers outside of the web server process and when a request arrives, the FastCGI manager sends the http data through a socket to one of the available fastcgi servers to handle this request. This strategy is quite simple and has the following advantages:

In the beginning FastCGI was not so popular, because its use of external processes and communication through sockets required more resources to be allocated on the host system. Today this is not the case, because for the last few years the hardware development made huge leaps ahead and system memory is not so expensive anymore. In present days many of the web servers have full support for FastCGI and the trend is to migrate the current web applications to run under it. These are some of the most popular web servers that have support for FastCGI: In November Microsoft announced support for FastCGI on IIS 5, IIS 6 and IIS 7 (Beta). Click here to read the announcement.

Table of Contents Plexus HTTP -- Perl-based server

TinyHTTPD

Recently I needed a test-bed for scripts that generate HTML, and file access didn't suffice. As usually, the first attempt at awk-ing the request from a socket(1) executed script soon grew big and ugly with ever more special cases being added. As the need to support ISINDEX and FORMs came up, I re-wrote the whole thing in perl. Now the simple test aid has become a program that can be used in similar situations when you need an HTTP server quickly without worrying to install a CERN or NCSA server.

This one does not have all the features needed; in particular, it knows only about text, HTML and GIF files and the support for CGI scripts is limited (just enough to check if they work and produce correct output). It supports only HTTP 1.0 and only GET and POST requests.

 
O'Reilly Network: Using Squid on Intermittent Connections

(Aug 5, 2001, 18:00 UTC) (742 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Dialup connections can be frustrating. Squid, a very popular piece of 'net caching software does a lot to cut bandwidth demands, but it isn't built for dialups. This article shows how to change that.


Apache Today - Web Servers of the Fortune 500 A Dissection and Analysis IIS if the king of large company Webserver farms with  iPlanet is a distant second.

I was minding my own business, checking my snail mail at the office, when all of a sudden I was assaulted: "IIS Most Used Web Server Among Fortune 500 Sites" slapped me upside the head like a two-liter shot of Mountain Dew. For those of you who haven't read the cover story of Volume 5 Number 10 of ENT or seen the article on their website--go do that first, and then come back.

After recovering from what I though must have been wrong, biased marketing research, I set out to prove ENT wrong

Results

I set about this study with a mission: To objectively collect data on the "brochure sites" of the Fortune 500. My secondary objective, of course, was to disprove the ENT study. My results were almost identical to theirs, however. If you look at the entire Fortune 500, from General Motors all the way to ReliaStar Financial, IIS reigns king. If you, however, look at subsets of the Fortune 500 and the types of companies represented, the picture is much different. Netscape Enterprise Server dominates until the Fortune 300 is looked at as an aggragate, where both Netscape and Microsoft share 41 percent of the market. This information was embedded in the ENT article as well.

Some Apache-related news

The C10K problem -- very interesting info on various servers performance issues

Web Servers Feature Chart contains an interesting table on features of virtually all the Web Server software packages.

Netcraft's Web Server Survey shows the market share of different Web Server software on Internet connected computers.

Recommended Links

In case of broken links please try to use Google search. If you find the page please notify us about new location
Google     

W3C Open Source Releases

Tutorials

Serving Up Web Server Basics

Perl, Sockets and TCP-IP Networking.

Network Programming in Perl - a well-written introduction to network programming with practical examples.

The documentation of the Socket and IO::Socket modules that comes with your perl distribution should be a valuable reference.

filehandle multiplexing with select()  describe a method to manage multiple sockets on the same thread.

Recommended Papers

 

Server Security

Perl servers

HTTPDaemon - a simple http server class

Table of Contents Plexus HTTP -- Perl-based server

TinyHTTPD

Recently I needed a test-bed for scripts that generate HTML, and file access didn't suffice. As usually, the first attempt at awk-ing the request from a socket(1) executed script soon grew big and ugly with ever more special cases being added. As the need to support ISINDEX and FORMs came up, I re-wrote the whole thing in perl. Now the simple test aid has become a program that can be used in similar situations when you need an HTTP server quickly without worrying to install a CERN or NCSA server.

This one does not have all the features needed; in particular, it knows only about text, HTML and GIF files and the support for CGI scripts is limited (just enough to check if they work and produce correct output). It supports only HTTP 1.0 and only GET and POST requests.

New Architect Make the Simple Things Simple

An HTTP server (a Web server) is an application that "listens" for connection requests from client processes (usually on other machines). Upon receiving a request, the server creates a new connection for the client, and then goes back to listening for other requests. This new connection is created in its own process on the server because the act of waiting for a connection is usually a "blocking" action during which no other processing can take place. As I'll show you later, there are some obstacles and detours when building such an application with Win32 Perl.

A lot of the pain in writing an HTTP server can be eased by using the libwww-perl library for Perl. For those of you who have used it before, Listing 1 may look a little odd. I'm actually using the new LWPng module, which supports many HTTP 1.1 features, including persistent connections (see the sidebar titled " Using LWPng").

A persistent connection maintains an open communication channel between the client and server until one side or the other forces the connection to be closed. Using such a connection, it's possible to create a Win32 server process that can fork and maintain communications with the client. Then we can establish several clients talking to the same server, each one in a conversational loop.

The scenario plays out like this: An HTTP daemon (we'll use the HTTP::Daemon module) is set up to listen for connection requests on a specified port. Clients (such as LWP::UA) contacting the server know they can expect to find an HTTP daemon listening at this socket, so they send a valid HTTP request (LWP::Request). The server binds the local and remote sockets to form a connection (HTTP::Daemon::ClientConn). Once the connection is established, bidirectional communication can take place. At this point, the server can close the connection, or start a new process on the server to handle communication with the client.

This is the moment of truth—the server needs to do three things to successfully hand off the client to another process:

  1. Create the new process
  2. Transfer the open connection to the new process
  3. Let the new process access the parent process "environment"

The fork command in UNIX is used to start a new process. It does this by creating a child process that is a clone of the calling, or parent, process. The new process not only shares the open connections, but the same data space, call stack, and memory heap as well. Both the parent and child processes continue executing the code that follows the fork command. If we want the child process to take on a new identity, we can call exec, which replaces the running process with a new program, usually pulled from a disk file.

Win32 programmers have a rougher go at it, because the Win32 process model differs greatly from UNIX. First, Win32 has no concept of "parent" or "child" processes. One process can create another, but they are essentially peers. The Win32 architecture doesn't allow the creation of a new process that shares the environment of another process. For example, each new process in Win32 maintains its own instances of referenced DLLs. The Win32 API call CreateProcess essentially combines the fork and exec functions of UNIX into a single action called a spawn. (For more information about Win32 processes in a Perl context, see Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions by Dave Roth.)

However, the usefulness of the fork hasn't been lost on the Win32 crowd, and there are emulations available for those who want to compile Perl using Cygwin32, or wait for ActiveState's next major release of its Win32 Perl implementation. It should be noted that these solutions are emulations of a core UNIX function that is simply not supported at the operating system level. The implementation-specific solution I came up with is just that—specific to a Perl HTTP::Daemon in Win32. With the disclaimers out of the way, let's look at the code.

 

HTTP

Proxy

 
O'Reilly Network: Using Squid on Intermittent Connections

(Aug 5, 2001, 18:00 UTC) (742 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Dialup connections can be frustrating. Squid, a very popular piece of 'net caching software does a lot to cut bandwidth demands, but it isn't built for dialups. This article shows how to change that.

 

Caching

Web Caching Documentation
In an effort to make users (web publishers) more aware of the issues and benefits of designing for Web caches, instead of trying to circumvent them, there is now a document that explains the why, what and how of caching in (hopefully) easy-to-understand language. It's particularly important to get this document to an audience of high-volume Web sites and hosting services.
Mark Nottingham @ 11/19/98 - 11:41 EST

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Last modified: November 20, 2009