Web Server/Hosting Basic

UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONTENT AND DELIVERY

Objectives

 Define the purpose of the web server

 Define the parts of the Uniform Resource Locator
 Understand the difference between upload and download
 Understand the HTTP Protocol
 Understand the web server to URL relationship
Purpose of the Web Server

 Deliver content based on user requests

 Interpret and implement the HTTP and related protocols
 Content is served to the client based on the LOGICAL to PHYSICAL path
translation
 Web servers are based on the basic telnet protocol
 The HTTP protocol only supports a few basic commands
 GET, HEAD, PUT, POST, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS, CONNECT, PATCH
 Only GET and HEAD must be implemented
 The required commands either deliver actual content (GET) or information
about the content (HEAD)
Advanced Web Servers

 Modern web servers implement nearly all HTTP commands and additional
functions
 The first “dynamic” method of delivering content was the Common Gateway
Interface (CGI)
 The system allows developers to write sophisticated programs to the basic interface
allowing for dynamic content delivery
 All modern web servers support some level of server-side scripting, typically PHP
on *NIX-flavor web servers to Active Server Pages on Windows-based systems
 These languages usually introduce additional scripting tags that get
dynamically replaced by the web server before the page is sent to the client
The Web Server to Client Connection

 Web clients, like Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. have ONE job
 Web clients translate user requests into requests to retrieve content from
web servers
 The user types an address into the client, e.g. www.fiu.edu
 The client automatically completes the URL by prepending “http://” to the
URL and submitting the request to its internal network engine
 The browser resolves www.fiu.edu and issues the following request to the
web server representing that host – GET /
 The web server automatically converts the request into an index page.
 You see in your client the HTML representing the “home” page for FIU
Understand the URL

 scheme://domain:port/path?query_string#fragment_id
 The scheme in the URL is usually http, but it can include SSL (https) or it can
be any other protocol
 The domain part is any resolvable host name.
 The port is optional and defaults to well-known values for the protocol (80
for HTTP, 443 for SSL, 21 for FTP, 22 for SFTP, etc.)
 The path specifies the LOGICAL path to the remainder of the URL
 The ? indicates that parameters follow as part of the query_string
 The # symbol can specify a location within an HTML page
Web Server Path Translation

 Web servers translate LOGICAL paths into PHYSICAL paths

 The path portion of a URL gets translated by the web server to serve content
 The web server contains path translation configurations providing the logical to
physical translation
 Apache-based web servers typically translate the ~username path to a
specific directory within a given user’s “home” directory
 To an Apache server, ~jdoe means the content lives in a specific directory in
the user jdoe’s home directory
 The FIU web server translates these user paths to the www folder for a given
user
Upload versus Download

 Upload is what you do when you PUT content somewhere

 Typical upload protocols are FTP or Secure FTP (a variation of FTP over
Secure Shell protocol)
 Uploads are almost ALWAYS authenticated
 Download is what you do when you request content from a server
 Typical download protocols are HTTP and HTTPS, but FTP is also common
 Downloads may or may not require authentication
FIU Solix Web Server Example

Client
Request
/~jdoe

Web Server
Client
Looks up
renders
jdoe’s
page
home path

If
index.html
Finds www
or
folder
index.htm
exist, return
Common Solix errors

 Permission denied
 Common causes are requesting the default page (no filename in URL) and
there is not a file called index.html or index.htm (case IS important)
 Web server permissions, use websetup script on Solix to fix
 404 File Not found
 Common cause is space(s) in the filename, word of advice, DO NOT use them,
use underscores instead
 Solix, since it is a UNIX-style web server is case-sensitive. It is possible that you
named the file Index.html instead of index.html
 File is not located in your www folder or is in the wrong sub-folder