Chapter 26

 

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26. WebSite Server Configuration

WebSite is a Web server on Windows NT and Windows 95. In addition to the server itself, WebSite includes many other tools to help you develop and maintain your own Web site: a graphical environment to help you develop documents (WebView), an HTML editor (HotDog), an image maps editor (MapThis!), and a tool for creating searchable indexes (WebIndex).

The WebSite server itself is configured using the Server Admin tool, which has an easy-to-use graphical interface.

There is also a secure version of the WebSite server, called WebSite Professional. WebSite Pro contains all the features and tools included with WebSite, adding cryptographic security with S-HTTP and SSL capability; the WebSite API, with an SDK (Software Developers Kit) and online documentation; support for Microsoft's ISAPI; ODBC/SQL database access with Cold Fusion 1.5; Perl 5 for Win32; server-side Java SDK; one-button publishing with Netscape Navigator Gold; support for Microsoft's FrontPage; and three books in its documentation set.

WebSite was developed as a team effort by Bob Denny, Jay Weber (and others from Enterprise Integration Technologies), and O'Reilly & Associates (publishers of this book). Although it is a commercial product, WebSite is available for free evaluation from http://software.ora.com. For additional information about WebSite, refer to http://website.ora.com.

This chapter describes the Server Admin items common to WebSite 1.1 and WebSite Pro, but does not cover the secure-specific features. The material in this chapter comes from the book Building Your Own WebSite by Susan B. Peck and Stephen Arrants, which is included with the commercial WebSite distribution.

All of the configuration options for WebSite are available in Server Admin. The property sheet contains the following pages:

General

Contains general server properties, such as the server root directory, port number, and administrator's address.

Mapping

Sets the mappings from URLs to physical pathnames; CGI directory locations; mappings of content types to file extensions; and directory index icons.

Identity

Contains the settings for "virtual servers" or multi-homed servers.

Dir Listing

Contains the settings for the enabling and formatting of directory listings when no default file is available.

Users

Used to manage users for your system, with their own usernames and passwords.

Groups

Used to manage special groups of users who may access certain parts of your web.

Access Control

Used to configure access control to URLs in your web, either by user/group authentication or class restriction (IP address or hostname), or both.

Logging

Specifies the locations of your logging files, the type of access file format, and tracing options for the server log.

CGI

The CGI page of Server Admin should be used by advanced users only. Many of the fields on this page are used to set command-line options for the various types of CGI programs that WebSite runs. This page will not be described here.

The settings available on each of these pages are described in the following sections. When you make a change to Server Admin and close it (or press Apply), a dialog pops up asking if it should update immediately (and terminate any active connections) or wait until the server is idle to update. Whichever you choose, you'll hear a beep when the update is made, indicating that the server's configuration has been updated. If the server is not running, you will not hear a beep, but the configuration is in effect the next time you start the server.

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The obj.conf File		General Properties

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