Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

A Local Network

Emboldened by the success of site.toddle, we can now set about a more realistic setup, without as yet venturing out onto the unknown waters of the Web. We need to get two things running: Apache under some sort of Unix and a GUI browser. There are two main ways this can be achieved:

• Run Apache and a browser (such as Netscape or Lynx) on the same machine. The “network” is then provided by Unix.

• Run Apache on a Unix box and a browser on a Windows 95/Windows NT/Mac OS machine, or vice versa, and link them with Ethernet (which is what we did for this book using FreeBSD).

We cannot hope to give detailed explanations for all possible variants of these situations. We expect that many of our readers will already be webmasters familiar with these issues, who will want to skip the following sidebar. Those who are new to the Web may find it useful to know what we did.

Our Experimental Micro Web

First, we had to install a network card on the FreeBSD machine. As it boots up, it tests all its components and prints a list on the console, which includes the card and the name of the appropriate driver. We used a 3Com card, and the following entries appeared:

...
1 3C5x9 board(s) on ISA found at 0x300
ep0 at 0x300-0x30f irq 10 on isa
ep0: aui/bnc/utp[*BNC*] address 00:a0:24:4b:48:23 irq 10
...

This indicated pretty clearly that the driver was ep0 and that it had installed properly. If you miss this at bootup, FreeBSD lets you hit the Scroll Lock key and page up until you see it then ...