Module 4

Syllabus-
Web Server Hardware and Software: Web
Server Basics, Software forWeb Servers, E-
Mail,Web Server Hardware
Web Server Basics
• The main job of a Web server is to respond to requests from Web
client computers
• There are 3 components of a Web server:
• Hardware
• Operating system software
• Web server software
e.webp

Types of Web Sites

• Development sites: Used to evaluate different Web designs
• Intranets: Corporate networks that house internal memos, corporate
policy handbooks, and a variety of other corporate documents
• Extranets: Intranets that allow authorized parties outside the company to
access information stored in the system
• Transaction-processing sites: Commerce sites that must be available 24
hours a day, seven days a week
• Content-delivery sites: Deliver content such as news, histories,
summaries, and other digital information
Web Clients and Web Servers
• Client/server architectures
• Client computers request services
• A server processes the clients’ requests

• Web software is platform neutral, meaning

that it lets different types of servers
communicate with a variety of clients
Dynamic Content
• Dynamic content is nonstatic information constructed in response to a Web
client’s request
• Dynamic page: Web page whose content is shaped by a program in response to user
requests
• Static page: An unchanging page retrieved from disk
• Server-side scripting (or includes)
• Programs running on a Web server create Web pages before sending them back to the
requesting Web clients
• Dynamic page-generation technologies: Server side scripts are combined with
html tags to create dynamic content
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• JavaServer Pages (JSP)
• PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
Server
• Server
• Computer used to provide files or make programs available to other computers
• Server software: Used by a server to make files and programs available to other computers
• Database server: Server on which database management software runs
Two-Tier Client/Server Architecture
• Request message: Message that a Web client sends to request a file or files from
a Web server
• Typical request message contains:
• Request line
• Contains a command, the name of the target resource, and the protocol name and version
number
• Request headers
• Can contain information about types of files that the client will accept in response to a
request
• Entity body
• Used to pass bulk information to the server
Three-Tier and N-Tier Client/Server
Architectures
• Three-tier architecture
• Extends two-tier architecture to
allow additional processing (e.g.,
collection of data from a database)
before responses to requests are
made
• N-tier architectures
• Higher-order architectures
• Third tier includes software
applications that interactively supply
and update information to and from
the web server
Software for Web Servers
• Operating system tasks include running programs and allocating computer resources
• Open-source software: Developed by a community of programmers who make it available for
download at no cost
• Linux: Open-source operating system that is easy to install, fast, and efficient
• Web Server Software
• The most popular Web server programs are:
• Apache HTTP Server
• Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)
• Sun Java System Web Server (JSWS)
• Netcraft
• A networking consulting company in Bath, England
• Accumulates popularity rankings
Some Servers
• Apache HTTP Server
• Apache is the results of an ongoing group software development effort, first developed by Rob
McCool at the University of Illinois in 1994 at the NCSA
• Apache has dominated the Web since 1996 because it is free (open source) and performs
efficiently
• Microsoft Internet Information Server
• Comes bundled with current versions of Microsoft Windows Server operating systems
• Used on many corporate intranets
• Supports the use of:
• ASP
• ActiveX Data Objects
• SQL database queries
Servers cont.
• Sun Java System Web Server
(Sun ONE, iPlanet, Netscape)
• Descendant of the original NCSA Web server program
• Formerly sold under the names:
• Sun ONE
• Netscape Enterprise Server
• iPlanet Enterprise Server
• Charges between $1400 and $5000 for the licensing fee
Electronic Mail (E-Mail)
• We all know the benefits of email
• Email drawbacks include:
• Time spent by business people responding to e-mail
• Computer viruses
• Programs that attach to other programs
• Can cause damage when the host program is activated
• Spams
• Spam:
• Spam is unsolicited or commercial e-mail
• During one 24-hour period in 2005 researchers estimated that 106 billion spam e-
mail messages were sent
Growth of spam
 Solutions to the Spam Problem
Reduce the likelihood that a spammer can automatically generate e-
mail addresses
Control exposure of an e-mail address
Use multiple e-mail addresses
Content filtering strategy
Requires software that identifies content elements that indicate if a message is
(or is not) spam

14
Web Site and Internet Utility Programs

Finger
Runs on UNIX operating systems
Allows users to obtain information about other network users
Command yields a list of users who are logged on to a network
Ping (Packet Internet Groper)
Tests connectivity between two computers connected to the
Internet
Tracert and Other Route-Tracing Programs
Tracert (TRACE RouTe)
Sends data packets to every computer on the path between one computer
and another
Clocks packets’ roundtrip times
Calculates and displays the number of hops between computers
Calculates the time it takes to traverse an entire one-way path between
machines
Telnet and FTP Utilities
Telnet
Program that allows users to log on to a computer connected to
the Internet
Telnet protocol
Set of rules used by Telnet programs
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Defines formats used to transfer files between TCP/IP-connected
computers
Web Server Hardware
Web server computers
More memory, larger hard disk drives, and faster processors
than typical PCs
Blade servers
Placing small server computers on a single computer board, then
installing boards into a rack-mounted frame
Virtual server (virtual host)
Maintains more than one server on one machine
Web Server Performance Evaluation
Benchmarking
Testing used to compare the performance of hardware and
software
Throughput
Number of HTTP requests that a hardware and software
combination can process in a unit of time
Response time
Time required by a server to process one request
Web Server Hardware Architectures
Server farms
Large collections of servers
Centralized architecture
Uses a few very large and fast computers
Distributed/decentralized architecture
Uses a large number of less powerful computers
Divides the workload among them