Web servers

Question: I have a set of files on my website with the extension .rpc. They are financial files, and I want to make sure that no one can access them from the web. Can i do that? Answer: On an Apache server, you can do just about anything, and .htaccess …

Question: My dynamic PHP-driven site is popular and is using a lot of bandwidth. What can I do to save that precious bandwidth? Answer: Those of you who have to worry about bandwidth should really consider yourselves lucky. It means that your website has been more successful than the majority …

There are many design benefits to using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but there are also technical ones that any website owner or server administrator should consider. Originally, websites were mostly just text and images with no fancy boxes, menus, or other slick layout schemes. Over time people started getting more …

In Linux, few commands are more important when managing your file system than “ls”. On a server, it is very important to know how to view files and their properties. With “ls” you can view a simple list of files or any number of more complicated variations of the list. …

Question: How do I configure my website to automatically go to a page other than index.***? Answer: If your web hosting provider is hosting your site using Apache HTTP server, you can accomplish this very easily with an htaccess file. If you do not already have one, create a plain …

Question: What are user agents, and why are they important? Answer: In the context of web servers, a user agent is any network host that connects to the server. Most frequently, it is used to refer to web browsers, but it can be other things as well. Anytime a search …

FXP stands for File eXchange Protocol, and is a method of data transfer that allows a user to transfer files from one server to another, without going through the user’s computer or network. The Good: In essence it is the closest thing to server-to-server transfer without direct access and the …

ModSecurity, a free and open source application firewall, is one of the best in the industry. Packt Publishing will soon be releasing a book about the software called ModSecurity 2.5 by Magnus Mischel. “This book is written for system administrators or anyone running an Apache web server who wants to …

Many content management systems (CMS) like Joomla recommend users disable a PHP security feature called “register_globals”. The default setting for it is controlled by your server administrator. If you have a shared hosting account, however, you still might be able to override the default server settings. To accomplish this, create …

Question: How do I password protect a directory on my website? Answer: Many web hosting control panels offer a “password protect” feature for your directories. If not, there is a moderately easy way to do it with an Apache .htaccess file. First, create an .htaccess file that looks like this: …