Perhaps
I'm just not in my right mind, then - I use bozohttpd. I
wouldn't go _near_ apache; it includes far too much stuff I have no
need for and therefore do not want in my exposed attack surface.
But, what are you
using the web server for?
Exporting stuff to the world.
Again, I qualified this as "public facing web
servers",
Oh, it's public-facing. It provides an HTTP view of my anonymous FTP
area. I don't know how much use it actually gets - I don't care enough
to bother extracting stats from the logs, especially since the Google
crawler drowns out almost everything else - but the major thing I would
miss if it were to break is my blah
(
http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/). I don't recall why I
initially started running it; the most plausible reason I can think of
offhand is to shut up people who were whining about having to
(horrors!) use something other than a Web browser to look at my stuff.
When you have a need Apache's functionality, you
run Apache ;P
Yeah, I did say "[u]nless you actually need some of its [] features".
Apache may have a lot of optional features, but as
widely as it is
used and as much auditing has been done on its code, I'd trust it
more than I would one of the smaller single threaded webservers.
A comparably feature-loaded one, perhaps. But I don't think that's
entirely fair when comparing against something like bozohttpd or (as
mentioned above) thttpd, which are very feature-poor; a feature that
isn't present in the code is a feature you're guaranteed to not suffer
from bugs in.
"There are two ways to make something appear bug-free: one is to make
it so simple there are obviously no defects; the other is to make it so
complex there are no obvious defects." (Paraphrased from memory.)
bozohttpd is 4358 lines, including overhead like the manpage and
Makefiles (I just checked), of which at least a few hundred are parts I
dike out. That's small enough to read over in full in an afternoon.
Apache's configure script alone is more than seven times that size.
Include files, over three times.
This is not _necessarily_ a problem; as remarked above, if you actually
have a use for those features, you need that code. I don't.
Any PII and PIII will support at a minimum 512MB of
ram
Maybe the CPU will. But that's not to say the machine will.
This one, I don't know; if I'd had large enough sticks of RAM for it,
the hardware might well have supported it for all I know.
but as long as you have swap, 32MB or 64MB would
probably work.
Oh, 32M _worked_...if you count thrashing for the better part of a day
to compile a single file as working. I don't really.
In any case, I don't consider that machine on-topic here; that was a
side note in response to something which I saw as implying that 128M
was some kind of effective minimum and that 32M was unusably little,
neither of which is true in my experience.
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