© 1997 by Prentice Hall PTR
If you have decided it is time to serve some information, either
to the whole Internet community or to a single organization, small
or large (i.e., via an Intranet), this may
be the book for you. My first job is to turn the may
into a yes or a no. If you have been in a bookstore and seen
shelves upon shelves of Internet-related books, you will likely
appreciate this direct approach. If you want a succinct (i.e.,
short and inexpensive) guide to establishing a network-based information
server on a UNIX® system, read on. If
you want a pseudo-novel where the details of serving information
are buried amid a mass of anecdotes and personal tales of woe,
then put this back before you get the cover dirty.
Let us begin by making sure you understand the scope of the material
that is presented within these pages.
Emphasis on information servers, not clients. Going out
onto the Internet and (for example) downloading a file with ftp,
sending mail, or reading someone's home page are client
activities and are initiated using client software resident on
the local computer. Setting up a secure ftp environment,
redistributing an incoming mail message to members of a mailing
list, or writing and making available a Web home page are
server activities and require special software resident on the
server. The majority of Internet-related books deal ONLY with
the client aspect of Internet information access. This is NOT
a book about using Web browsers like Mosaic, Netscape, and HotJava,
nor is it a book that attempts to be a dictionary of servers to
go and visit. This IS a book about designing and maintaining a
server to support anonymous and enhanced ftp, Listservers, and
Web-based access. Having said that, one chapter (Chapter Five)
is devoted to obtaining and configuring client software, since
it is required (1) to get the server software you need, and (2)
to review the information on your own server as it is added.
Emphasis on the organization of the information. What makes
a good server is not necessarily fancy presentation, but the quality
and organization of the information. This book cannot help you
with the quality of your information; however, it can make it
easier to navigate and find the information.
Establishing an information server on a UNIX system. While
many of the principles are the same, irrespective of whether the
operating system is a UNIX variant, Microsoft Windows 3.1®,
Microsoft Windows 95®, Microsoft Windows
NT®, Apple Macintosh®
operating system, etc., I have chosen to restrict the discussion
to all versions of UNIX to remain more focused. Windows and possibly
Macintosh-specific versions of this book will be available in
the future.
Degree of UNIX administrative experience required. You
have to have root access to the system (either yourself or working
with the UNIX system administrator) and understand the rudimentary
aspects of file system layout, UNIX security, script programming,
daemons and so on. It would also help to be familiar with
writing code using the Perl interpretive language. In short, the
intended audience is most likely folks who look after their own
UNIX workstations or servers, but that task is only a prerequisite
for getting your real job done. Now your real job involves, in
addition, providing information to remote network clients. This
could be as simple as providing your own demographic information
for an electronic directory maintained by your organization, to
providing teaching materials, to providing a complex front-end
supporting iterative query of an underlying information resource.
Internet access assumed. There is not a detailed technical
discussion in this book for getting connected to the Internet.
That is, getting physically connected, getting an Internet address
and being able to resolve addresses. I will show you how to determine
whether you have met all the prerequisites for being connected,
and if not, where to go for more information on types of connectivity,
Internet providers, etc.
If you are still reading, either you are lucky enough to have
too much time on your hands, or you have met the prerequisites
and belong to the intended audience. The next question to ask
yourself is whether the format of this book is going to be helpful
to you? To answer this question, consider my motivation in writing
the book.
Over the past couple of years, I have been responsible for establishing
and supporting information and information servers on UNIX platforms.
What frustrated me in the beginning was the lack of a good overview
of what software I should be installing, where I could get it,
and how I could organize my information to make its presentation
most effective. I would be misleading you if I said sources, either
online or printed, were not available today to help. In fact,
the opposite is true. The problem is that there is so much
information, it is hard to know where to start.
My goal is to make this cookbook that place to start. You decide
with my help what to cook and then gather a set of ingredients
- software obtained free from the Internet, optional commercial
software, and of course, the information itself. You put these
ingredients together using the right utensils, and follow steps
a through z. The result should be an Internet feast for a world
of information consumers
This cookbook goes one step further in that it contains a global
recipe - a recipe of recipes - to get you to all the other recipes.
You can also think of the global recipe as a roadmap. With a traditional
map, you begin with something that covers a large area (the introduction
in this book) and gradually homes in on where you need to go (individual
chapters and sections).
Choosing the route raises questions. Do I go on the Interstate?
Do I take the scenic route? The analogy with the Information Superhighway
(no pun intended) leads to questions like: Should I provide support
for video clips? Is gopher support still necessary? Which is the
most secure of the World Wide Web (WWW) servers? Should I support
a WWW forms interface? Should I support Java applets for
access from Java-ready browsers?
Beyond answering the global questions, each chapter takes pieces
of the global recipe, provides a list of software ingredients
and where you can get them, and describes in a step-by-step fashion
how to put them together to get the job done.
Getting the software installed is the beginning, not the end of
the process. This book details how to organize your information
for effective access by the various tools, create meaningful links
between items of data, and effectively use graphics, frames and
clickable maps to facilitate navigation and convey the information.
Information access on the Internet started as a passive process
- reading of static text and images. It is now possible to engage
in an active dialog, enter queries and get a response that can
be subsequently refined as part of a more explicit query. Further,
this whole process can involve sight, sound, and animation.
I devote a significant portion of this book discussing how you
can support all these features. How sophisticated you want your
server to be depends on how much you want to learn about such
tools as Perl, HTML frames, and Java. People learn best from examples,
so I include several scenarios, real and imaginary, to illustrate
what can be achieved. For the real ones, code can be downloaded
from the information server associated with this book and used
as a template for your own exciting and innovative information
servers.
If you are still undecided about whether this book meets your
needs, look at the Global Recipe and its description and the Table
of Contents (which is the more traditional form for presenting
this recipe) and possibly the Introduction. You can do this either
by further reading this book, or by visiting the information server.
Setting up an information server can be fun and rewarding if accessed
by lots of folks or by the few people you really want to access
it. Remember, however, that how the information is presented
is a minor issue compared to the question of what information
is presented. Just as I have an obligation to write the best possible
book I can so that I am not taking your money under false pretenses,
I also have an obligation to serve up the best information on
my Internet server so as not to waste anyone's time. The community
at large has, so far, fulfilled this obligation admirably.
These are exciting times, in some ways reminiscent of a gold rush.
We make up rules as we go, and what appears as a rich area of
inquiry one day, with many people staking a claim, is forgotten
the next. The end result of a gold rush, when the dust finally
settled - or more correctly ran out - was an infrastructure of
towns and cities that spurred economic development and social
accomplishment. When the dust begins to settle on the Internet
we will have a similar, albeit virtual infrastructure, that places
a significant part of the total body of human knowledge at our
fingertips. Who knows what we can achieve with such a resource?
I am proud to help you become an active contributor to that resource.
Philip E. Bourne, San Diego, September 1996