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Let’s consider some possible server scenarios. Note as you consider these examples that the choices of WAN links are shown as examples only; any one of these servers could handle relatively high-speed or low-speed links.
Here are some scenarios of some typical server environments.
Here, the site has chosen the Interjet server appliance from a vendor called Whistle. The Interjet provides all of the server functions, both Web and ancillary, the site needs. The Interjet even includes routing functionality. This scenario would be very appealing to a library with little technical staff whose ISP is willing to support a server appliance.
Here we are running Windows NT Server as our operating system, with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, or IIS, as our Web server software. We are also running Microsoft’s SiteServer, a collection of Web publishing tools that assist in managing large, complex sites. We rely on FrontPage for posting content to the server. This is a fairly typical Microsoft-oriented configuration. It would be easy to extend this server to run other Microsoft tools, such as Active Server Pages and a live database. Our DNS services are provided off-premises by our ISP. Our e-mail services are handled by a separate server at our site, which might or might not be a Microsoft-based server.
Here we’ve chosen a server from a traditional vendor of Unix hardware. We’re running Netscape’s FastTrack server. Our content providers publish to the server either via FTP or via Netscape’s “One Button Publish” extensions. We are relying on separate server boxes at the library to provide DNS and e-mail services.
Here we’ve chosen a Macintosh as our server. We’re running Apple’s conventional operating system at version 8.5 along with Appleshare IP extensions. Our Web server software is WebStar, which we’ve coupled with middleware from Lasso to offer live content managed by the popular FileMaker Pro database software, with the database software and Web server both on the same physical server.
This scenario exploits the most popular Web server package, Apache, and the Linux operating system, which is enjoying increasing popularity as an alternative to proprietary Unix systems (and Windows NT). This scenario is appealing because it relies on an operating system and on server software that are free.
Although in this example we show DNS and e-mail being provided by separate servers, Linux comes with built-in DNS and e-mail capabilities, so it would be just as easy to run those services on the same box as our Web content. Here we might choose not to do so for several possible reasons:
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DNS and e-mail were already running on separate servers on site.
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We don’t want any performance problems with our Web server.
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We don’t want an outage in DNS or e-mail to force us to take down the Web server for service.
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We want different staff to work on the Web server than the DNS and e-mail, and we don’t want to give “superuser” or “root” permission to other services for our Webmaster.
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