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Comments and suggestions concerning this book should be mailed to gmourani@videotron.ca © Copyright 1999-2000 Gerhard Mourani and Open Network Architecture ® 363 Linux Apache Web Server Overview Apache is the most used HTTP server in this world today. It surpasses all free and commercial competitors on the market and provides a myriad of feature than the nearness opponent could give you on a UNIX variant. It’s also the most used web server for a Linux system. A web server like Apache in its simple’s function is software that display and serve HTML pages hosted in a server to a client browser that understand the HTML code. Mixed with third party modules and programs, it can become powerful software, which will provide strong and useful services to a client browser. Most of the users that will read this book are often and especially interested to know how to install Apache web server and put it in the most secure and optimized way. In its base install, Apache is no more difficult to install then the others software we are installed on our Linux server. The procedures can become tricky when we want to add some third party modules or programs. There are a lot of possibilities, variants and options for installing Apache. So, in the following we provide some step-by-step examples where you can see how to build Apache with other third- party modules and programs like mod_ssl, mod_perl, PHP4, LDAP connectivity, etc. Of course the build of these software are optional and you are free to compile what you want, i.e. you may want to compile Apache with support for PHP4 capability but without SSL or PostgreSQL database connectivity. For simplification we assume some prerequisites for each example. If these don't fit your situation you have to adjust the steps. In this chapter, we explain and cover some basic ways in which you can adjust the configuration to improve the server's performance. Also for the interested users, we’ll provide a procedure to be able to run Apache as non root-user and in a chrooted environment for optimal security. These installation instructions assume  Commands are Unix-compatible.