ADMINISTRATION HELP, ADMINISTRATION TUTORIALS, ADMINISTRATION ARTICLES

In addition to its core component, Samba comes with a bunch ofpretty powerful ancillary utilities: an SMB client, an SMB filesystemmounter, a backup tool, and a Web-based administration utility. Find outhow you can use them, inside.

Tired of paying hundreds of dollars for commercial file serversoftware? Looking for an application that lets you share *NIX andWindows files seamlessly across a network? Say hello to Samba, softwarethat's so cool, it'll make you want to kick up your heels and dance,dance, dance!

Apache isn't just the planet's most popular Web server - it'salso one heck of a proxy server. This article explores the process ofinstalling and configuring Apache to act as a proxy server for yournetwork, demonstrating how it can be used to cache frequently-accessedWeb sites, log Internet access and block offensive domains, in additionto serving up Web content. Talk about getting two servers for the priceof one!

Worried about greedy online merchants snooping around your harddrive when you visit their e-stores? Wondering how much personalinformation a site actually collects and stores about you? You might beinterested in P3P, an upcoming privacy standard that hopes to bring greatertransparency to the way personal information is used over the Web.

Looking for an email client that offers superior performancewithout sacrificing on features? Take a look at Mutt, the planet's coolestmail client, from the perspective of a long-time fan and user, and find outwhat you've been missing.

Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X, has a UNIX at it's core. What can you do with that? Make a killer development box that includes runtime environments for PHP and MySQL! This article runs you through all the steps for building Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your Mac OS X-based box.

To meet the demand for greater, more flexible access to real-time electronic transaction processing, transaction processing providers are lowering the barriers of entry, and opening the interfaces to their systems, allowing developers an opportunity to create custom interfaces for electronic commerce systems. In this article we show how easy it can be to connect your website to these systems and add real-time credit card processing to your programming arsenal.

You've seen how many Web sites (including this one) allow you topost comments and opinions on the material they publish. If you've everwished you had this capability on your Web site, or are simply curious asto how this is accomplished, read on.

Are you new to the wonderful world of databases? Confused by thesudden flood of technical jargon? Don't know the difference between a"trigger" and a "stored procedure", a "join" and a "subquery"? Look nofurther - the solution is right here!

Learn more about the world's best-loved Web server, with examplesof Apache's authentication and logging capabilities, and also pay a briefvisit to its unique URL re-writing module.

While the default Apache configuration is good enough for mostWeb applications, there's a lot more under the hood of the planet's mostpopular Web server. In this article, find out how to create virtual hostson a single Web server, and use Server-Side Includes for greaterflexibility in your HTML pages.

The best part about Apache is that you can custom build it to include exactly what you need. The defaultconfiguration is a good one, but its far-too-general nature is, by definition, not the best choice for the majority of installations. With a host of plug-in modules available for free over the Internet, customizing Apache to its fullest extent is not only fast and easy, but well worth the time spent.

Squid is an excellent open source web caching proxy package, but it requires quite a lot of tuning to achieve the kind of performance seen in commercial proxies. This article presents several independently useful ideas for tuning a web cachingsystem. If all of them are implemented, extremely high performance can be achievedfrom modest hardware...

The second article in our series on setting up webservers the easy way, this article covers setting up virtual hosts, allowing you to server multiple domains from one box; and certificates, which are needed to do SSL.

This excerpt from Wrox Press Ltd.'s Professional Apache covers Chapter 8 - Improving Apache's Performance. It tells you how to configure Apache for peak performace using caching and clustering, plus much more. Buy it on Amazon.com now!