12112014
`
`Spinnir the Web WWW Servers
`
`Spinning the Web Setting Up World Wide Web
`Servers
`
`September 1994
`
`DISCLAIMER -- All of the technologies described in this
`document are changing rapidly so please consult appropriate
`software/hardware vendors and applicable USENET groups and
`LISTSERV lists
`
`James Powell
`Scholarly Communications Project University Libraries
`Institute and State University
`Virginia Polytechnic
`jpowell@scholar.lib.vt.edu
`
`HTML is but one component of the World Wide Web You are probably most familiar with
`second
`then you are probably new to
`client applications such as Mosaic but if you are just starting web project
`the concept of servers The term server refers both to the computer to which users connect
`for data and to
`server requires some planning You must select
`the software used to distribute the data Setting up
`hardware and server software to suit your current needs but that will also support some growth
`
`Hardware
`
`Before you can consider what world wide web server is best for you you must evaluate the equipment
`you have available and the type of network connections An ethernet connection with TCP/IP software
`node on the Internet is essential
`In other words the
`configured so that the server workstation is
`machine must have
`reachable Internet address or at least accessible to your intended audience That
`department on
`closed network but for the remainder of this talk lets assume your audience
`could be
`is fairly widely dispersed on the Internet worst case scenario if you will Try telneting from the
`intended server or FTP or ask for help from networking guru
`
`Assuming you pass the network requirements look now at your available platforms Most any recent
`light traffic server By that
`computing platform and recent means 1988 onwards will be acceptable as
`mean perhaps eight or ten simultaneous users Fewer machines qualify as suitable for high traffic so
`powerful server lying around unused But
`cluster of machines can
`you are unlikely to just have
`function just as well if document placement is planned carefully For example say your home page is
`extremely popular and so are one or two documents you publish Simply place the popular documents on
`different server than the home page and configure appropriate links in the home page Suddenly you
`have more powerful and more responsive distributed server Not only that but you can also duplicate
`the contents of both servers on both machines and reconfigure the links in the event of
`system failure
`Then unless the building burned down you can stay online through the worst hard drive crash or power
`supply failure
`
`But back to platforms The Scholarly Communications Project for which
`
`provide technical support
`
`httpllscholar.Iib.vt.edu/reports/Servers-web.html
`
`1/6
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`Petitioner IBM – Ex. 1046, p. 1
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`

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`12112014
`
`Spinnir the Web WWW Servers
`
`single system no more
`publishes modestly popular collection of documents
`to the Internet using
`semi-antique in the computing world It
`than an Intel 486 clone This system is Nextstation
`powerful
`has never as yet experienced major hardware failure in three years of almost continuous operation
`And it has experienced ice storms bad cables power fluctuations and several operating system upgrades
`with less than 24 hours of down time per incident What
`this means is that reliability to me is that
`than horsepower Any 486 system that has
`good service record will make
`is more important
`reliability
`an excellent server However Nextstations have fairly speedy networking built into the motherboard so
`486 with VESA EISA or PCI ethernet adaptor is recommended These acronyms all stand for speed
`low speed ISA data transfer bus These support what are called l6bit ethernet
`Ordinary pcs had
`server system Network speed will probably be your
`adaptors In my opinion these are too slow for
`biggest problem and you may as well do the best you can at your end to keep things moving fast
`
`Before we move onto Macintosh and other hardware platforms let me talk
`bit about operating systems
`Many people do not believe it matters what operating system you use on PC when that machine is used
`few bad ones As
`believe it does and
`think there are some good choices and
`server
`rule
`as
`believe single user operating systems are simply not suitable for permanent information servers One
`server down for ten minutes or more If you must use
`General Protection Fault under windows can take
`Microsoft Windows as
`server environment give up using the machine for any other purpose Dont let
`few minutes here and there Windows was not designed
`anyone install software on it or use it even for
`to support network server activity it sometimes has trouble functioning as
`good Internet client
`server on an Intel 486 platform there are many excellent
`environment
`If you are serious about running
`alternatives to DOS/Windows
`These environments are designed for multiple users and perform true
`multitasking This means system resources are well distributed among users and applications Each user
`and process receives their own segment of memory which is protected from other users thus greatly
`system-wide crash For familiarity try Windows NT This environment
`reducing the likelihood of
`protects applications from one another and from crashing the system by proving each package with its
`own portion of memory like UNIX IBMs OS/2 environment
`is equally as stable but would go OS/2
`native rather than install OS/2 for Windows Finally there are several excellent UNIX environments
`available For the beginner nothing is easier than Nextstep But if you cannot get the education pricing
`public domain UNIX for PCs that
`is rather expensive LINUX is
`then it
`is popular and widely
`isnt nearly as easy as Nextstep but many people on the Internet use it for anything you can
`supported It
`LINUX Usenet news group Ive also heard
`imagine and will be willing to help if you post
`question to
`good things about Unixware and Interactive Unix but believe Sun Microsystems Solaris is probably
`bad choice and wouldnt recommend it due to many problems reported by people using the Sun
`computer version Nextstep and LINUX are probably the two most widely supported PC Unix
`environments for Information servers such as world wide web and are worth looking into if you UNIX
`NT and OS/2 make efficient use of memory and manage system resources well for multiuser access
`
`class of capable servers although one drawback
`The Macintosh hardware has recently evolved into
`the Macintosh environment Like Microsoft Windows it
`
`is
`
`is
`
`is
`
`than Windows
`single user environment While there is little doubt it
`better graphical environment
`server environment One problem is the
`is not my first choice as
`more mature and well thought out it
`great deal of hand tuning But on the bright side
`poor memory management Memory useage requires
`Apple makes some very fast computers these days While Mac Quadra with
`68040 microprocessor
`similarPC configuration
`power mac can pass most PC clones easily Networking
`will usually match
`is usually built in for further performance gains over pieced together PC clones And if the Macintosh
`web server software is
`native power pc application rather than an older Macintosh program that must
`be run in emulation mode on the Power Mac then you have
`potentially powerful server But you must
`once again swear off on using the machine for any other purpose When that little bomb pops up on your
`screen the other users simply get nothing but perhaps angry that your server goes up and down so often
`
`httpllscholar.Iib.vt.edu/reports/Servers-web.html
`
`2/6
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`Petitioner IBM – Ex. 1046, p. 2
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`

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`12112014
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`Spinnir the Web WWW Servers
`traffic servers PC or Mac memory is an important consideration
`would recommend that
`Even for light
`server have at least 16mb of RAM Some of the PC operating systems recommend require this much
`at least And of course there is no such thing as too much of
`good thing with memory Get 32mB if you
`can at all afford it But memory is not cheap so if 16Mb is all you can afford make sure you have
`hard drive and adapter card All modem operating systems can use harddrive space as additional memory
`this is virtual memory It can save you money and make your machine support more users
`
`fast
`
`Now if you are planning to put up
`encourage you to investigate
`library or university
`server for
`purchasing one or more Unix workstations to function as your server Consider systems from Sun
`Micro systems Hewlett Packard IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation Sun workstations are fairly
`well supported although they essentially switched operating systems in the last two years leaving some
`unhappy customers But they are rebounding and have some good prices on Sun Classic models If you
`new low cost
`get Classic buy two -theyre small Hewlett Packard recently released
`line of
`workstations called the Gecko They are definitely worth
`look and have the added bonus of Nextstep as
`said before Nextstep is the easiest UNIX there is and excellent for
`an alternative to HPs own unix As
`beginning systems administrators IBM sells many types of its workhorse RS6000 including
`new
`power pc version but Ive heard many stories about difficulties with their operating system AIX But if
`good choice Finally DEC
`you can get web server up on it easily and you probably can then it
`offers excellent deals to higher education and offers some of the fastest and most affordable servers on
`the market in its Alpha line of workstations Here again the stumbling block will be their Unix OSF but
`version of Windows NT for Alpha workstations that might be worth
`on the bright side there is
`server in this class 32 Mb of RAM is the minimum and
`considering When selecting
`recommend that
`you not purchase system with less than 64Mb of RAM for this purpose But memory is expensive and
`you can probably get by with 32Mb until you have some access logs to justify the extra expense
`
`is
`
`Weve covered memory and networking capabiltiy but what about storage recommend that you start
`light traffic server with Gb of online storage Hard drives are cheap and you will
`it up faster than
`UNIX workstation should have at least 4Gb of storage There are new 9Gb drives for what
`you think
`4Gb drive last year so why not consider one of these There is also RAID
`you would have paid for
`technology but believe that
`server like this where data is not being constantly updated
`is overkill for
`But that does lead me to an important issue
`backing up Be absolutely sure to consider data backup and
`permanent server Put together workable plan and purchase what you
`recovery before you establish
`need to perform frequent backups Weekly backups are essential so buy
`tape drive that can store all
`the
`data on your initial configuration on one tape so you have no excuse not to perform frequent backups
`DAT drives and 8mm Exabyte drives are relatively inexpensive Buy one and protect your data from
`hardware failures and security violations
`
`fill
`
`And remember you can skimp on things like monitors and keyboards since you wont be using the
`machine as anything but
`server
`
`Web Servers How they work
`
`World Wide Web server is simply
`program that answers requests for documents from world wide
`web clients over the Internet All world wide web servers use
`to communicate
`language or protocol
`with web clients called the HyperText Transfer Protocol This is where the http in web url comes from
`including HTML graphics sound and video Data
`All types of data can be exchanged using this protocol
`types are identified by the server and preceded by MIME header MIME is Multipurpose Mail
`Extensions Web clients convert open URL commands into HTTP GET requests So if you type
`Mosaic would convert this to GET jpowell.html command
`http//scholar.lib.vt.edu/jpowell.html
`issue the command and wait for
`to the web server running on scholar.lib.vt.edu
`response The
`connect
`response can be the requested document or an error message You can actually simulate web client by
`
`httpllscholar.Iib.vt.edu/reports/Servers-web.html
`
`3/6
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`Petitioner IBM – Ex. 1046, p. 3
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`

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`12112014
`
`Spinnir the Web WWW Servers
`telneting to web server and specifying port 80 the web server along with the internet address then type
`GET in all upper case and the name of
`file that exists on the server and its path if necessary After the
`document or error is returned the connection is closed HTTP is
`stateless protocol which means there
`is no continuous connection between the client and server as with for example telnet You may be
`lot of work It receives only raw HTML or other data and has
`starting to realize that web client does
`sound player after determining what type
`helper application such as
`to perform formatting or launch
`of data it has received The server only send the data and goes away Web clients are responsible for
`virtual HTML
`interacting with non-web servers such as gopher or ftp directly and they create
`document while doing so
`
`So what else does web server do They can log activity Servers can record the internet address time
`and request made for each connection Servers can also protect certain files from non-authenticated users
`Finally servers can forward requests for data that neither the client nor the server can access directly to
`applications called gateways With gateways the web can support datatypes and resources not even
`conceived of when it was invented Gateways can allow web clients and servers to function as Z39.50 or
`relational database clients Data is gathered by the Web client usually using an HTML form sent to the
`server along with the name of
`gateway program to be run Then the gateway reformats the data and
`response and reformats that response as an HTML document
`sends it
`to an information server receives
`which is delivered to the web client Gateway support logging and user athentication are important
`specific web server with logging an absolute necessity both for
`features to look for when selecting
`useage statistics and security
`
`So what server software is available on the Internet
`
`One of the easiest server applications to install and use is MacHTTP for Macintosh systems It
`installed like any Mac application and launched just like any other program by double clicking It comes
`preconfigured with its help files as HTML documents available once the server is running Simply launch
`web client on any networked computer and open the URLhttp//your.server.name/
`to browse the
`documentation Then customize the server software as needed and place it
`in your startup folder
`The number of simultaneous users can be set from to
`Configurable data is stored in MacHTTP.config
`1000 and access can be restricted by IP addresses Most other settings are probably fine at the defaults
`This is the only Macintosh web server
`know of although there may be others One recently added
`feature is native PowerPC support This means the server will run at workstation speeds on
`PowerMacintosh
`
`is
`
`Since Microsoft Windows is such
`is not big surprise that several web
`popular end-user environment it
`servers exist The best by far is NCSAs HTTPD for Windows While this is
`large and complex
`package installation is unbelievably simple After retrieving the software you simply unzip it
`into an
`HTTPD directory off the root directory and add
`SET command to your Autoexec and reboot Once
`windows is up again simply double click on the server icon Once launched up to eight simultaneous
`users can access your documents stored in the servers root directory One thing
`discovered right away
`is that this server does not function as well with windows 32 bit extensions as without So if you are
`installing it on machine with
`recent 2.0 version of Mosaic which requires these extensions you may
`wish to reinstall Windows to and do without Mosaic for optimum performance NCSAs server supports
`the funcitonality of UNIX servers It also supports accessing data from other Windows applications
`which opens up possibilties perhaps not available with UNIX server such as retrieving data from
`spreadsheet or word processor It relies on Visual Basic 3.0 for scripting so be sure to get
`copy of this
`if you are interested in forms support Our Computing Center recommends SerWeb or Web4Ham
`available from popular FTP sites in the Winsock directory Both run with Trumpet Winsock and have an
`initialization or INI file which has to be edited to customize server functions These initialization files
`are short and mostly self-explanatory would recommend NCSAs HTTPD for Windows over either of
`
`all
`
`httpllscholar.Iib.vt.edu/reports/Servers-web.html
`
`4/6
`
`Petitioner IBM – Ex. 1046, p. 4
`
`

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`12112014
`
`Spinnir the Web WWW Servers
`functionality of Unix web servers to
`is much more serious attempt at bringing the full
`these servers It
`is so similarto the UNIX server that experience with it would not be wasted if you later
`Windows It
`chose to advance to UNIX-based server Even for testing this is preferable to the minimal functionality
`of SerWeb and Web4Ham Windows web servers are most suited for
`group authoring web documents
`small group of people
`or to share documents among
`
`Windows NT and OS/2 are each supported directly by one native server HTTPS is
`fledged web
`server for Windows NT that matches all the features in current UNIX servers OS/2 can be web server
`using Web2
`
`full
`
`Finally UNIX has the most web servers available The first web server from CERN was created for
`UNIX and new versions are frequently posted at their ftp site This server and NCSAs httpd for UNIX
`support basically the same features the HTTP protocol authentication gateways activity logging and
`image maps The CERN server has in my experience been the easier of the two to set up but gateway
`support was late coming to it so we ultimately switched to NCSAs server With UNIX servers the
`programming language files
`source code is sometimes all that is distributed This can be
`collection of
`that need to be compiled on the computer before the server can be used However both NCSA and
`CERN supply precompiled versions for some computing platforms Retrieve one of these if available or
`get help if youve never compiled anything before or are wondering what it means to compile something
`interesting and easy to use UNIX server is the GN server It has the unique ability to function as
`Another
`gopher and World Wide Web server This is easy to configure and
`recommend it
`both
`if you are just
`starting out It has the advantage of being able to support two access methods to one collection of data It
`has
`item search feature and can also search archives of documents up to about 100
`simple gopher/web
`
`files
`
`web server With few exceptions web servers do not
`Searching is another consideration with running
`provide any built in method of searching collections of HTML documents nor do they provide direct
`support for search WAIS or relational databases There are
`few options depending on the platform you
`are using For UNIX GN has limited built in searching that may be sufficient
`for your needs Then there
`is freeWAIS which provides relavence feedback and boolean full text searching WAIS stands for Wide
`Area Information Server and is widely used full
`text indexing search and retrieval engine available on
`commercial version of WAIS that does all freeWAIS can do and more and
`the Internet There is also
`comes with technical support There are SQL gateways for UNIX to allow you to create HTML forms for
`searching relational databases such as SYBASE or ORACLE
`
`The public domain WAIS software is also available for Windows NT And on the Macintosh
`applesearch can be integrated with MacHTTP to provide full text searching
`
`plan detailing roughly the number of documents you wish to publish determine the size of
`So develop
`your potential audience and determine how much you can spend on your server project Use this plan to
`volunteer to run it And be sure to keep track of useage so it will be
`server and software and
`select
`easier to justify funding for expansion in the future World Wide Web is already the most popular client
`server information tool on the Internet and may become as common as electronic mail soon So think
`big
`
`Finally dont forget to register your new web server for inclusion in whats new regional server lists and
`note to the World Wide Web listserv and
`topical server lists such as CERNs Virtual Library Usually
`to the Usenet group comp.infosystems.www.misc will be sufficient And be sure to read
`for new server and HTML developments
`comp.infosystems.www.providers
`
`httpllscholar.Iib.vt.edu/reports/Servers-web.html
`
`5/6
`
`Petitioner IBM – Ex. 1046, p. 5
`
`

`
`12112014
`
`Spinnir the Web WWW Servers
`
`Spinning the Web Setting Up World Wide Web Servers Slides
`
`httpllsGholariib.vt.edu/reports/Servers-web.html
`
`6/6
`
`Petitioner IBM – Ex. 1046, p. 6