Security Portal: Web server round-up, Part 2

“Last month I started the web server round up, and unfortunately
it looks like I bit off a lot more then I can chew. Properly
testing each web server takes a lot of time (10-30 hours), and that
doesn’t include any time to actually write about the results. Well
I’ve finally worked my way through most of the servers, and it’s
been interesting. A web server isn’t any good if you can’t get it
installed properly, configured properly, or if it simply does not
posses the feature set you require. The majority of these products
do allow you to download demonstration versions (or are completely
free in some cases), I would advise trying them out first to make
sure you end up with the one you want (in other words don’t believe
everything you read, including this =).”

“Ease of installation”

“This is an obvious choice for the first thing to cover, if you
can’t get the server installed properly it’s probably not going to
do you much good. In some cases the installation required compiling
of software components, but the majority of the commercial products
that are OpenSource (and partially or completely available as
source code) came in binary format, easing installation. Where
possible I used binary installations, as this is what the majority
of users will opt to do (I have nothing against compiling
personally, but most people will take the path of least resistance,
myself included). For the “free” SSL based server that use
OpenSSL you also have to compile or find a binary of OpenSSL, so I
included that in the process where it was required. In all cases I
would recommend getting the most recent version, they will contain
any needed bug fixes, and any installation/compiling problems that
exist in older ones have probably been fixed. All my installations
were done on a stock Red Hat 6.1 box, and in no case did I hit any
significant difficulties, in most cases the installs took less then
5 minutes.”

Complete
Story