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Perl CGl Programming: No experience required.
(Publisher: Sybex, Inc.)
Author(s): Erik Strom
ISBN: 0782121578
Publication Date: 11/01/97

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The same can’t be said for Windows NT, which, at this writing, was available in versions for DEC Alpha and MIPS machines. This relative paucity of ports is due mainly to NT’s Windows interface, which in this case is both its strength and weakness. Where UNIX has to support only a bare-bones command-line interface, or at worst a generic graphical interface, Windows NT is just that—Windows. It would be difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to reproduce the Windows interface on any old computer because it relies a great deal on direct interaction with the hardware, something UNIX absolutely forbids except at the device-driver level. NT places the same restrictions on hardware tweaking at the higher levels, but its underlying code deals with Intel microprocessors directly, in their own language. This extremely low-level code was modified to make NT run on Alpha and MIPS machines. But when you run Windows-specific programs on these non-Intel machines, NT actually runs them through software that emulates an Intel chip.


NOTE:  Writing programs to make one computer emulate another computer is nothing new at Microsoft. According to legend, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, students at Harvard University in the late 1970s, commandeered the university’s PDP-11 computer to write software that emulated Intel’s then-brand-new 8080 microprocessor. They used their emulator to write the BASIC-language interpreter that led directly to the birth of Microsoft.

Windows NT comes in two flavors—Server and Workstation. The former is intended to be the backbone of a large network, the latter is intended to run on workstations on the large network. NT Workstation differs very little from Server in its look and feel. However, Workstation does have a built-in restriction on the number of connections that can be run into it at one time, which makes it unsuitable for running a Web server.

NT Server 4.0 comes with Internet Information Server, a fine Web server package that also includes FTP and Gopher servers. You aren’t restricted to IIS, however. Netscape’s Web server (which supports the server-side includes you learned about in Skill 8) is also available for NT, and the Sambar server runs well on it, too.

Security on NT is complex but it can be made quite tight. A system administrator can apply a range of permissions for individuals or groups of users down to the level of a single file or up to the entire network. From IIS, the Webmaster decides precisely which directories—if any, outside of the home-page and CGI application directories—will be accessible to visitors. The FTP server works the same way, as illustrated in Figure 11.3.


Figure 11.3:  One of the configuration screens for the IIS FTP server


WARNING:  There is a story about an NT system administrator who so missed UNIX that he named the administrative user “root,” which is the highest-level user on most UNIX systems. A system catastrophe wiped out the operating system, but left most of the files on his system intact. However, when he reinstalled NT, which excised the user named “root” along with all of the other former users, he found that all of his files were owned by a nonexistent user and thus were inaccessible to everyone. It took days and many dark curses to fix the problem.

Windows 95

Windows 95 almost had to be called Windows 96, so close did Microsoft come to the end of 1995 in its first release of the new operating system. But, in its intended role as a straight, 32-bit replacement for Windows 3.1, this operating system took hold of the buying public very quickly. Windows 95 is now installed on probably more personal computers than any other operating system, which means it’s running a lot of computers.

Unlike NT, Windows 95 wasn’t built from the ground up. It still retains at its lowest levels some of the old 16-bit MS-DOS subsystem code. Some applications written to take advantage of NT won’t run on Windows 95 because of this leftover Windows stuff.

However, lots of applications that will get you nothing but stern warnings from NT run perfectly well on Windows 95. It does especially well with older DOS programs that play with the hardware—where NT has strict and inviolable rules about messing directly with the machine, Windows 95 plays a little more fast and loose.

This popular OS was the first to feature Microsoft’s Explorer graphical user interface. It probably had a great deal to do with Windows 95’s instant success because users, especially so-called newbies, found the new interface to be intuitive, well-designed, and really easy to use.

As a Web server platform, Windows 95 would probably be best used as a testing site before moving the fully debugged code and graphics off to the real Web server. The Sambar server gets along quite well with Windows 95 and it would be perfect for this purpose, using what you learned in Skill 2 to set it up.

However, this is not to say that you couldn’t run a full-blown, publicly accessible Web server on Windows 95. Provided your hardware setup is beefy enough, you should have no trouble at all from the operating system.

Security issues are practically nonexistent on Windows 95 because security itself is practically nonexistent, which is one of the disadvantages to using this OS on a real Web site. From the Desktop, all you need to do to log in to a signed-off, password-protected Windows 95 computer is type in a name at the login prompt. If that user name doesn’t exist, Windows 95 happily asks you to give yourself a password and come on in. There are ways to secure files and directories for a particular user, but they aren’t hard to circumvent.

What this means is that you would be relying totally on the security built into your Web server software to prevent unwanted intrusions over the Internet. The Sambar server handles these security issues pretty well, but it makes most Webmasters nervous to have to deal with security through the server without having the OS to back it up.

The lack of security features in Windows 95 isn’t surprising, nor is it a particularly bad thing. Though the OS supports the concept of multiple users with their own desktop profiles on a single machine, it was never intended to be anything more than the new Windows 3.1. It has lots of bells and whistles that make it seem more sophisticated than it really is. It’s a great workstation OS when it’s hooked into a network server. But the fact is, Windows 95 is fine for a single user on a single machine. To attempt to make it do more than that would stretch its capabilities.


TIP:  Windows 95 doesn’t have the restriction on simultaneous connections that makes NT Workstation a bad candidate as a Web server platform.


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