Managing Internet Information Services World Wide Web, Gopher, FTP, and more

By Jerry Peek, Adrian Nye, Cricket Liu, Russ Jones, Bryan Buus
First Edition   
Pages: 668
ISBN 10: 1-56592-062-7 | ISBN 13: 9781565920620

This book is OUT OF PRINT.

Book description

This comprehensive guide describes how to set up information services and make them available over the Internet. It discusses why a company would want to offer Internet services, provides complete coverage of all popular services, and tells how to select which ones to provide. Most of the book describes how to set up Gopher, World Wide Web, FTP, and WAIS servers and email services.
Full Description

Managing Internet Information Services describes how to create services for the millions of Internet users. By setting up Internet servers for World Wide Web, Gopher, FTP, Finger, Telnet, WAIS (Wide Area Information Services), or email services, anyone with a suitable computer and Internet connection can become an "Internet Publisher." Services on the Internet allow almost instant distribution and frequent updates of any kind of information. You can provide services to employees of your own company (solving the information distribution problems of spread-out companies), or you can serve the world. Perhaps you'd like to create an Internet service equivalent to the telephone company's directory assistance. Or maybe you're the Species Survival Commission, and you'd like your plans online; this book describes a prototype service the authors created to make SSC's endangered species Action Plans viewable worldwide. Whatever you have in mind can be done. This book tells you how. Creating a service can be a big job, involving more than one person. This book separates the setup and maintenance of server software from the data management, so that a team can divide responsibilities. Sections and chapters on data management, a role we call the Data Librarian, are marked with a special icon.

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Media reviews "Managing Internet Information Services is a solid guide to providing information from an internet-connected Unix system. It contains: two introductory chapters on the internet and internet services; one chapter on finger, inetd, and telnet; three chapters on ftp; two on WAIS; eight on gopher; five on the Web; and five on mailing lists (and ftpmail). There are also chapters on how firewalls and use of xinetd affect these services, and two chapters on legal issues.

"The chapter on the Web describes how to install a Web server (where to get the source from and how to compile it), how to configure it, maintain it, how to author material for it, what packages there are for producing usage statistics, how to use gateways to other services, and so forth. The sections on gopher, ftp and WAIS are similarly structured. In each case one particular implementation is described in depth (eg. NCSA httpd, wuarchive ftpd), but most of the material is general, and I think a good deal of it would be useful even with non-Unix implementations. It is assumed throughout that the reader has a solid knowledge of Unix and the basics of the internet. "The sections on the Web and ftp, the services I have had the most experience with, are very well done. I knew nothing about WAIS before reading Managing Internet Information Services, but it inspired me to create a WAIS index to my book reviews and a Web gateway to go with it; the book explained everything clearly and saved me lots of time. I only read the introductory chapters on gopher, and I skipped the mailing list stuff completely, but I have no reason to suspect they are of lower quality. "While Managing Internet Information Services covers almost everything one could want, there are two things I would like to have seen included. One is a discussion of information management at an abstract level: to some extent general database and file-system issues can usefully be separated from the details of particular services. The other is some material on USENET. Not on running a news server (which is covered in another O'Reilly book), but on using USENET to provide information: how to work out what is appropriate for which newsgroups, why spamming is a bad idea, and how to advertise without upsetting lots of people. This could be coupled with advice on how to moderate a newsgroup and how to maintain FAQs and other regular information postings.

"The 'data librarians' in charge of services and the system administrators of the machines providing them are the obvious audience for Managing Internet Information Services. Ordinary users who maintain extensive on-line resources will also find it a cornucopia of useful information. Since it is these people who make the Internet what it is, and because Managing Internet Information Services should encourage others to join their ranks, I think it is the most important book on the Internet to appear for a long time."

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