Apache Web Server Widely used including many high end web sites. We can divide web serving into two aspects, the network part and the content part. These are largely independent of each other and often one finds different people maintaining these different aspects of a web server. But they are not completely independent, the configuration of the web server will impose certain constraints on the content. Obviously if Apache, does not include the PHP module, web pages that have PHP code will not work. Probably everybody knows that to run a web server on the internet you need to have a domain name which needs to be registered. Many ISP's offer users space for a personnal web page which doesn't require registering a domain but then you don't control the server either. A web server doesn't have to be on the internet. There are many uses for internal web servers and many large corporations have internal sites in addition to their public sites. HR and project tracking are uses that seem to be very common. Another use is WEBDAV. WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning" more info at http://www.webdav.org Another use is for testing content before putting on a public site. When Apache is running, it is known as httpd. Main configuration is done through the file /etc/httpd/httpd.conf. After changing the configuration file, enter the command "apachectl restart" to have the changes take effect. On Suse 8.1 the command is "rcapache restart". The "ServerRoot" parameter in httpd.conf specifies the "root" of the directory tree to be used by Apache. This used as the base for all relative paths in the configuration. "DocumentRoot" is the root directory for documents to be served. A file named index.html in this directory will be the default start up page. With the server running, you can add files in the tree to build a site and/or test pages. Just remember that each new item needs to have a link from the start up page or from a page that is already linked. There is also software for searching a web site available at http://www.htdig.org (This is software to incorporate into the web server.) References: http://www.apache.org this the primary site for apache There's a couple of HOWTO's Apache-Overview-HOWTO.html Apache-Compile-HOWTO.html HOWTO's should come with most distributions and can found on the web at http://www.linux.org under documentation. At the URL http://httpd.apache.org/info/apache_books.html you can find a list of, as they put it, all known books about Apache.