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further reading: web sites on internet servers

Internet
TCP/IP
history
server choices
tuning web servers
DHCP
print serving
file serving
FTP
SAMBA
Mail Transport Agents (e-mail servers)
Majordomo
application serving
other web sites

further reading: books on internet servers

Internet

“There is much more to the art of using the Internet to gain a competitive toehold than just a mere E-Mail application or home page on a Web site for advertising purposes. The Internet, driven by demands of the new, competitive business environment, is forcing enterprises to integrate data, text, voice, and image information in various formats, and also to be open and networked. It is dynamic — based on interchangeable parts — and it technologically empowers by distributing decision making to users in all functions, including marketing, customer service, human resources, security and legal, as well as traditional technical experts within the information services division of the enterprise. The Internet is providing a backbone for team-oriented business structures. A shift is occurring in the nature of enterprises and how they gather, maintain, use, and update their data and information.” —Building a Corporate Internet Strategy, Amit K. Maitra, page xi^b6

“Unix in general is making a comeback due to the Internet.” —Nicholas Petreley^w74

    Though it may be hard to believe today, the explosive growth of Internet commerce caught nearly everyone by surprise. (Even many venture capitalists were slow to recognize the importance of Tim Berners-Lee’s landmark invention, the World Wide Web.) But a decade after the first Web pages appeared, and five years after the early e-commerce sites got rolling, a few principles are becoming clear. Most importantly, technology matters. You’ve got to have a fast, efficient Website that delivers what customers need in a matter of a few seconds. (If it takes longer than about eight seconds for a Web page to load, chances are that twitchy surfers will click away without waiting to see those fancy graphics.) Behind the scenes you need the right database structure and analytical tools to support e-commerce activities, along with the ability to handle customer inquiries interactively in the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week world of the Web. Protecting the site is essential too; hackers can deface or hold a site hostage, and computer viruses can ricochet through millions of machines in a matter of hours.^m3

    It’s also crucial to match the technology to the business goals of the company. The days are long past when all you needed to crank out a Website was a couple of programmers who had a bit of HTML know-how and the stamina for late-night bouts fueled by pizza and double lattés. “If you seriously want to get into the game today, it’s a $3 million to $5 million investment,” says consultant Tim Cuny, principal at Lante Corp. in Chicago. “The ante has gone up because it’s not just about putting up a site. It’s answering the question ‘How am I going to run my business?’ ”^m3

    Indeed, the Internet is altering the rules on how companies manage their sales, service, and distribution operations. It is providing new opportunities for businesses of all stripes to reach new customers, as well as forge closer ties with existing customers and business partners. By turning to the Internet, businesses can speed communications with both customers and suppliers, reduce paperwork, lessen cycle time, and automate buying and selling systems. —Fortune Technology Guide^m3

    For heavy-traffic Websites, a dedicated server is a must. —Fortune Technology Guide^m3

     “The Internet is Unix. It was built on Unix. It has drawn attention to Unix. And today’s college graduates were weaned on Unix as a result. This is the generation that is now entering the IT workplace.
    “Yesterday’s college students learned their UNIX expertise on Linux and FreeBSD. Today they’re working in IT departments, and many of them are openly hostile to both Microsoft and Windows NT. As a result, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and other forms of UNIX are finding their way into IT departments, both overtly and on the sly.
    “For example, are you sure that’s an NT server you’re connecting to at work? IS employees in many corporations have secretly installed UNIX servers that provide native NT services. Why take such a risk? Linux and FreeBSD are free, as is SAMBA, the software that provides NT services. So the IS department saves money. And managers are unlikely to find out UNIX is behind the scenes because fewer people will complain about server downtime.
    “Fewer people will complain because the servers are more stable than Windows NT. Linux, FreeBSD, and BSDI UNIX outperform Windows NT by a wide margin on limited hardware, and under some circumstances can perform as well or better than NT on the best hardware. Once behind in scalability features, UNIX on Intel is catching up and may soon surpass NT in the number of processors it can use, and how it uses them.” —Nicholas Petreley (editor-in-chief of NC World and columnist for InfoWorld and NT World Japan), “The new UNIX alters NT’s orbit: The re-emergence of UNIX threatens to modify the future direction of NT”, NC World, April 1998^w51

“UNIX is a mature, technically superior group of operating systems with a proven track record for performance, reliability, and security in a server environment. The almost thirty years of continual development, performed often by volunteers who believe in what they’re doing, has produced a group of operating systems—and extremely powerful multiprocessor server hardware tailor-made to its needs, whose performance is still unparalleled by Intel hardware—that not only meets the demands of today’s computing needs, but in many cases exceeds them.” —Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX ^w51

“What is not trivial, however, is that a networked operating system [Windows NT] in this price range should ship without a telnet server, SMTP server (e-mail), disk quotas, news server, or at least a DNS server that works to customers’ satisfaction (many NT administrators feel compelled to go with third party DNS solutions). In order to match the functionality of a BSDI installation, additional Microsoft products and third-party solutions would bring the final price of a comparable NT solution to around $4,000, according to BSDI white paper compare.” —“Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

“Linux uses internet and industry standard components and protocols giving a system with complete network integration. The operating system can act as a server for most major file serving protocols, and provide all the major internet applications.”^w25

TCP/IP

http://www.stokely.com/unix.sysadm.resources/faqs.t-z.html#faq.link.tcpip “Stokely’s TCP/IP & Ethernet, Cable Modems FAQ links”

history

In 1957 the U.S. government created the Advanced Research Project Group (ARPA) in esponse to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik. ARPA was intended to develop key technology that was too risky for private business to develop.

ARPA created ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet, in 1969.

In 1973 ARPA created Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) to network together computers for ARPAnet.

In 1983 the University of California at Berkeley released a version of UNIX that included TCP/IP.

Tim Berners-Lee of the European CERN laboratory created the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer in 1990.

Server Choices

“Unix is making a comeback on several fronts. The Internet is Unix. It was built on Unix. It has drawn attention to Unix. And today’s college graduates were weaned on Unix as a result. This is the generation that is now entering the IT workplace. And eventually they will be IT managers.” —Nicholas Petreley, “The new Unix alters NT’s orbit”, NC World^w74

“What can you expect from Windows NT Server out of the box and from UNIX out of the box? NT can communicate with many different types of computers. So can UNIX. NT can secure sensitive data and keep unauthorized users off the network. So can UNIX. Essentially, both operating systems meet the minimum requirements for operating systems functioning in a networked environment. Put briefly, UNIX can do anything that NT can do and more.” —“Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

“To summarize, once you logon to an NT network, all you can do is read files and print. In a UNIX environment, once you log in to a UNIX server, you can be on that machine and do anything on it that you could do if you were sitting at its keyboard and mouse! With NT, don’t plan on being able to set up an e-mail server with the software at hand. You will need to buy expensive mail server software like Microsoft Exchange Server separately. If your NT server should function as a file server — what else can you do with it really? — don’t plan on being able to prevent users from crashing the server by filling up the disk(s) with their data.” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

“Meanwhile, Windows NT already loses on many more competitive issues. Linux, FreeBSD, and other forms of Unix can be configured as a firewall right out of the box. Windows NT cannot. Free Unix operating systems have built-in features like IP masquerading. Windows NT doesn’t even do basic IP filtering without additional software.” —Nicholas Petreley, “The new Unix alters NT’s orbit”, NC World^w74

in alphabetical order

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by AIX: American Express, Borders, FT.com, NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), PlanetRx.com, Prudential^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by Digital UNIX (Compaq Tru64 UNIX): AltaVista.com, Amazon.com, Lycos.com, the Vatican, WellsFargo.com^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by FreeBSD: Amiga.com, Amiga.de, Apache.org (the Apache Project), Be.com (makers of the BeOS), Hotmail.com, LinkExchange (owned by Microsoft), Netcraft.com, OSdata.com, Sony Japan, TeenWitch.com, WitchingHour.net, Yahoo.com (also uses Linux)^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by HP-UX: HP (Hewlett Packard), Wal-Mart^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by IRIX: Hustler, Maserati, MayoHealth.org, Nissan, SGI (Silicon Graphics)^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by Linux: 1st-Netcard.com, Deja News, Etoys, free-dvd.org.lu (SuSE/Linux), Google.com, HomeStore.com, LinuxSucks.org, MP3.com, Napster.com (Red Hat), NetBroadcaster.com, NetWare, PayPal.com, PlanetofMusic.com, Rackspace, Real.com, Red Hat (Red Hat Secure Linux), royal.gov.uk (the British Royal Family), Slashdot.org, Yahoo.com (also uses FreeBSD)^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by Mac OS X Server: Apple Computers (also uses Solaris)^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by Solaris: AccountOnline.com, AllHealth.com, Amiga.org, Andover.net, AOL (America On Line), Apple Computers (also uses Mac OS X Server), Aria.com, AT&T, BabyCenter.com, BillGates.com, BMGMusicService.com, CNN (Cable News Network), CNNSI.com, Discovery.com, Disney, Epicurious.com, Equifax, E-Trade.com, FoodTV.com, General Electric, General Motors, GetSmart.com, Java.Sun.com, MacroMedia, More.com, MTV, MyCoupons.com, nCipher, Netscape, NYTimes.com, Oracle, OurHouse.com, Penthouse, PepsiCo, Playboy, ShockWave.com, SportsLine.com, Sun MicroSystems, Virgin.com, WashingtonPost.com, Weather.com, WhiteHouse.gov, W3.org^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by Windows NT: ABCNews.com, AudioHighway.com, Burger King, Compaq, Ebay.com, EDiets.com, ESPN, Ford, Gillette, Intel, MarthaStewart.com, NextCard.com^w52

Businesses and organizations with servers powered by Windows 2000: a712.m.akastream.net, BigCharts, Dell, Hotbot.com, Hotmail.com (for the last several months, Microsoft has been in the process of attempting to switch Hotmail from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 — the fact that it is taking Microsoft months and they are only about 10% converted should tell you everything you need to know about the “ease of installation” of Windows 2000), MarketWatch.com, Microsoft.com, MilkSucks.com, MSN.com, MSNBC.com, NASDAQ, OnHealth.com, ValuPage.com, WindowsMedia.com^w52

“Windows 2000 has yet to see significant takeup with hosting companies, but this was clearly set out as a goal for Microsoft by Steve Ballmer in the advent of the Windows 2000 launch.”^w53

“When it comes to more sophisticated networking functionality, it seems that Microsoft’s NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition can’t hold a candle to the more mature commercial UNIX operating systems. Although not essential to network performance, 64-bit computing is here today with these UNIX operating systems (as opposed to NT’s 32-bit operating system). D.H. Brown Associates Inc. reports the results of their analysis as follows (the following quotation along with the table and the three graphs immediately following the table are excerpts from a Web page on Digital Equipment Corporation’s site entitled AIX 4.3 Leaps To 64-Bits In Dead Heat With Digital UNIX 4.0):” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

AIX 4.3 takes the lead in Internet/intranet networking features by providing the broadest set of TCP/IP extensions and adding value with a bundled Notes server. Digital UNIX comes in second place with strong network security capabilities, bundling not only Web-browsing capabilities but also Web-authoring tools, with Navigator Gold, and a solid set of TCP/IP extensions. However, Digital UNIX lacks advanced NFS features such as CacheFS and AutoFS. IRIX 6.4 places third, bundling CacheFS and AutoFS, and network security features almost as strong as Digital’s. But IRIX lacks network time facilities (NTP) and TCP/IP capabilities such as IPv6 and IPSec. Sun follows, with good support for NFS functions and the second-place array of TCP/IP extensions. However, Sun relies on its own Web server, rather than Netscape, Microsoft or Apache, and lacks authoring tools as well as important services such as Novell’s NDS directory service. HP provides strong Internet support within HP-UX, bolstered by its good showing in advanced Internet protocol function and network security, while lagging behind in support for advanced NFS capability. HP-UX, along with AIX, has also established a lead in supporting NDS. While Microsoft NT 4.0 provides Internet/intranet support that overall rates as “Good,” NT lags behind the leading UNIX vendors due to poor support for directory services, network security, NFS, and few TCP/IP extensions. Microsoft has largely focused adding value to its bundled Web server product and to tuning its Java Virtual Machine.” —Digital Equipment Corporation, “AIX 4.3 Leaps To 64-Bits In Dead Heat With Digital UNIX 4.0”^w51

	HP-UX 11.0	Solaris 2.6	AIX 4.3	Irix 6.4	Digital UNIX 4.0d	NTS 4.0/EE
Extension
IPSec	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
IPv6	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
RSVP	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
IP Multiplexing	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
IP Multicast	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial
Performance Optimizations
Telnet in kernel	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Kernel Sockets	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
TCP Large Windows	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Zero Copy TCP/Hardware Checksum	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Path MTU Discovery	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
OpenShortestPathFirst (OSPF)	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
RTP: Real Time Protocol	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
RTCP: Real Time Control Protocol	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
Parallelized TCP/IP	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

INTERNET/INTRANET NETWORKING FEATURES

Networking Features Graph

tuning web servers

www.digital.com/info/internet/document/ias/tuning.html — “Digital UNIX Tuning Parameters for Web Servers”

DHCP

dhcp.org IETF DHC working group for users and implementors of DHCP

http://www.dhcp-handbook.com/dhcp_faq.html “DHCP FAQ” compiled by John Wobus of Syracuse University and maintained by Ralph Droms and Ted Lemon (authors of the DHCP RFCs and the ISC DHCP server)

ftp://ftp.eng.auburn.edu/pub/doug/ “bootp-DH2.x” free, patched CMU BOOTP-DD2.4.x server from Doug Hughes of auburn.edu. Supports DHCP, even for Win95 clients. Adds the patches from the Samba mailing list to support PCNFS and Win95 simultaneously. For SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x, Linux and NetBSD servers.

http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP “Internet Software Consortium DHCP Server, Client, and Relay agent” freely redistributable tools: source builds on most Unix platforms, Mac, NeXTStep, and Rhapsody.

http://www.rite-group.com/consulting/solaris_dhcp.html “Setting up a Solaris DHCP Client”

http://www.rite-group.com/consulting/solaris_nat.html “Setting up NAT on Solaris using IP Filter”

http://www.zdjournals.com/sun/9905/sun9951.htm “xDSL and cable modems in a Solaris home network”

http://home.austin.rr.com/sunhelp/rr/solarisrr.html “How to Setup your Solaris 2.5, 2.6, or Solaris 7 system for use with Austin’s RoadRunner service by Time Warner” using rrlogin, Perl, DHCP, MD5.

http://www.princeton.edu/~irwin/dhcpd.html “Princeton Patches to CMU dhcpd 3.3.7” free software provides DHCP, bootp, tftp, true dynamic IP addresses, and reporting tool for NetBSD and Solaris.

http://www.join.com “JOIN DHCP/DDNS” commercial integrated DHCP and DDNS servers from Join Systems for DHCP and BootP clients running on SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x SPARC and x86, Digital UNIX, HP-UX 10.x using Motif GUI, evaluation copies available online.

http://www.baynetworks.com/Products/nav/f_netid_3_0.html “NetID” commercial DHCP/DDNS server from Bay Networks that runs on Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 95; links into Oracle and Sybase, with tools for managing IP addresses.

print serving

Print serving is using a computer to provide other computers with access to one or more printers through a network. This allows sharing a very expensive or specialized or high speed printer among many computers. Many modern printers (especially expensive ones) are capable of connecting directly to some kinds of networks.

“To summarize, once you logon to an NT network, all you can do is read files and print. In a UNIX environment, once you log in to a UNIX server, you can be on that machine and do anything on it that you could do if you were sitting at its keyboard and mouse!” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

file serving

“Since Microsoft sees NT as a viable alternative to all other network-capable operating systems on the market, UNIX and Novell included, one would assume that NT would come with all the tools necessary to accomplish the most basic tasks required: file and printer services. Any systems/network administrator knows from experience that there are two important issues to be considered when setting up a file server or adding a new network user: security, i.e. passwords and file permissions; and quotas for limiting disk usage of any new or existing users or groups. Although NT provides basic password security, it only provides file-level security if you choose to use its proprietary filesystem called NTFS. Some MIS departments are reluctant to implement this file system (at least on users’ machines), because they feel that recovering from disk problems is hindered by the use of NTFS. More important than this issue, however, is that NT does not provide any mechanism for limiting a user’s disk usage! UNIX and Novell, on the other hand, provide software for performing this seemingly elementary control.” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

“To summarize, once you logon to an NT network, all you can do is read files and print. In a UNIX environment, once you log in to a UNIX server, you can be on that machine and do anything on it that you could do if you were sitting at its keyboard and mouse! … If your NT server should function as a file server — what else can you do with it really? — don’t plan on being able to prevent users from crashing the server by filling up the disk(s) with their data.” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

“Another disk related design flaw in the Microsoft suite of operating systems is its antiquated use of ‘drive letters,’ i.e. drive C:, drive D:, etc. This schema imposes hardware specific limitations on system administrators and users alike. This is highly inappropriate for client/server environments where network shares and file systems are to represent hierarchies meaningful to humans. UNIX allows shared network filesystems to be mounted at any point in a directory structure. A network share can also span multiple disk drives (or even different machines!) in UNIX, thus allowing administrators to maintain pre-existing directory structures that are well-known to users, yet allowing them to expand the available disk space on the server, making such system changes transparent to users. This single difference between the UNIX and Windows operating systems further underscores the original intentions of their respective designers: UNIX was conceived as a client/server operating system for professional use, whereas Windows and its descendents sprang from DOS, an operating system that was never intended to be a player in a client/server environment, much less a server. For more detailed information on this topic, see Nicholas Petreley’s article It will take less drive to make most PC operating systems work like Unix” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

FTP

http://www.princeton.edu/~irwin/dhcpd.html “Princeton Patches to CMU dhcpd 3.3.7” free software provides DHCP, bootp, tftp, true dynamic IP addresses, and reporting tool for NetBSD and Solaris.

http://www.stokely.com/unix.sysadm.resources/faqs.a-m.html#faq.link.ftpds “Stokely’s FTP Servers System Administrator FAQ links”

SAMBA

Everytime various UNIX maufacturers attempted to create a client program that ran on Windows to allow Windows users to access UNIX servers, Microsoft would change the Windows operating system so that it crashed the client programs. An open source group decided that it was easier to go the other way around, and created a program that allows UNIX servers to connect to Windows computers through Microsoft’s own SMB file sharing system. This program is called SAMBA, and actually provides a more stable version of SMB file serving than Microsoft’s own proprietary version..

http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba/ “Samba Web page” (Native Windows networking on Unix)

Mail Transport Agents (e-mail servers)

“With NT, don’t plan on being able to set up an e-mail server with the software at hand. You will need to buy expensive mail server software like Microsoft Exchange Server separately.” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

“For most businesses, e-mail has become an indispensable tool for communication, and most companies run their own internal/external e-mail systems. With Windows NT, you will have to buy a separate software package in order to set up an e-mail server. UNIX operating systems come with a program called Sendmail. There are other mail server software packages (or MTAs, Mail Transport Agents) available for UNIX, but this one is the most widely used, and it is free. Some UNIX administrators feel that exim or qmail are better choices since they are not as difficult to configure as sendmail. Both exim and qmail, like sendmail as well, are free for use even in a commercial environment. Many NT-based companies use Microsoft Exchange Server as their MTA. This is an expensive solution with limited success in an enterprise environment. Microsoft Exchange Server Enterprise Edition — 25 Client Access Licenses costs $3,549.00. If you have more than 25 employees, the same package with 50 Client Access Licenses costs $4,859.00 (Source: Microsoft). For more information on this topic see http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/sendmail-exchange.html ֹMicrosoft Exchange versus Sendmail: Views of Other MIS Professionals’.” —John Kirsch, “Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

Majordomo

http://www.stokely.com/unix.sysadm.resources/faqs.a-m.html#faq.link.majordomo “Stokely’s Majordomo System Administrator FAQ links”

application serving

“NT is often considered to be a ‘multi-user’ operating system, but this is very misleading. An NT server will validate an authorized user, but once the user is logged on to the NT network, all he/she can do is access files and printers. The NT user cannot just run any application on the NT server (in order to take advantage of the superior processing power of server hardware). An NT user can only run special applications that have been written in two pieces, i.e. client/server applications. When a user logs in to a UNIX server, he/she can then run any application (provided the user is authorized to do so), thus taking the processing load off his/her workstation. This also includes graphics-based applications since X-server software is standard issue on all UNIX operating systems.” —“Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX”^w51

geek humor

“The postman always pings twice.” —Bill Pechter

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won’t bother you for weeks.” —Rodger Donaldson

Ring around the Internet
A packet with a bit not set
ENQ ACK ENQ ACK
We all go down!

—Allon Stern

“There’s some joke making around about some mathematician that said that 1000 chimpansees in 1000 years sitting at 1000 typewriters would eventually write the works of Shakespeare. And the snap around the joke is that the Web proves this is not so.” —Kurt Vonnegut about the Internet in “Vonnegut’s Timequake”, All Things Considered, September 22, 1997, National Public Radio

“Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea — massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.” —spaf (1992)

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