Remember: If you're already running an HTTP server, you should shut down that server before you begin the installation if you plan to install the new server on the same port.

Also: If you want to run a second server on this same machine, either binding to a different IP address or using a different port, simply run this install a second time with the new configuration. It will create a second server using the new port or IP address, and the two will share binaries (saving disk space.)



Your server will use the name you give your server here as the central Uniform Resource Locator (URL) when users access your home page. An example URL is the URL for the home page of Netscape Communications, "http://home.netscape.com/". Be sure to include your domain name as well as the machine name.

Your system administrator may have already set up a DNS alias for your server such as www.subdomain.dom. If this is the case, then you should use that alias here. If not, you should use the machine's name combined with your domain as the name.

Remember that if you activate security on your server, the URL used to refer to the server will become "https://www.[yourdomain].[dom]/" instead of just http. At times it may be desirable for your workstation to answer to two URLs. For example, you may want to serve both "http://www.a.com/" and "http://www.b.com/" from one machine. Due to limitations in the HTTP protocol, this is difficult. There is one trick to do this, however, which involves causing your machine to think it must answer to more than one IP address. This trick only works on certain systems.

If you have already set up your system to listen to multiple IP addresses and want to use this feature, you must tell this installation of the server which IP address it belongs to. The machine your server runs on has a number of ports that the machine uses to differentiate requests using different protocols. Just as the standard Telnet port number is 23, the standard HTTP port number is 80, and the standard HTTPS port is 443. You can choose any port number from 1 to 65535 - but you should be careful which number you pick:

If you decide to activate security on your server, remember that the default port for HTTPS is 443, not 80. Before security is active, you can use a URL of http://yourserver.domain.dom:443/ to access your server.

If you have any doubts at all about which port number you should use, you should probably use the standard port. It's useful to give a short name to identify your server for the purposes of administration. This identifier will also be used as a directory name under the server root to store the configuration files.

The name should contain no spaces or slashes.

Examples:

While running, the server should only have restricted access to your system resources. Although you may have to start the server as root, you probably don't want it to be root all the time. The server will automatically change its username to the Unix user you specify here after startup.

Many times, there is already a user named nobody that is designed for exactly this purpose. However, on some systems, nobody is not a valid user. In that case, you should create a new Unix user for the server. If you are unfamiliar with creating Unix users, you should consult your system administrator or your system's manual. The server creates a number of processes on your server machine when it starts up. The threads of these processes take turns answering requests. With a threaded server, it makes sense to keep the number of processes relatively low, and the number of threads high. The server creates a number of threads on your server machine when it starts up. These threads take turns answering requests. You can set the number of threads to achieve a balance between system load and request response time. The number should be determined by the number of requests you expect and the speed of the hardware your system runs on. On a low-demand system, the server may only need five or ten threads. On a very high demand system, you may want to use as many as thirty threads.

If you are having trouble setting this number, consult your Server Reference Guide for more details. When a network navigator connects to your server, the server only knows the client's IP address, e.g. 198.95.251.30. The server does not know that this IP address is actually the host name www1.netscape.com. For certain operations like access control, CGI, error reporting, and access logging, the server will resolve that IP address into a host name.

If your server is very popular, and responds to many requests per day, you will want or may even need to stop this resolution from happening. Doing this can reduce the load on your DNS or NIS server, at the cost of a little convenience. By creating a root directory for all of your documents, you can keep all your documents in one location and let the server handle the URLs. This way, any incoming request for a document automatically gets redirected to the document root directory you name here. Full file system pathnames are not used and are not displayed on any network navigator. This keeps your file system safe from outsiders who won't be able to get any information about the rest of your system.

The installer creates this directory if it does not already exist.