Servers for the Information Age

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
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Robogen is a software for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT based computers which can help you create robots.txt files without having to worry about the correct syntax of a robots.txt file. It comes in two editions: the free Limited edition and the Standard edition which costs $12.95. You can get Robogen from http://www.rietta.com/robogen/.

In this article, I’ll tell how you can use Robogen to simplify the process of creating a robots.txt file. This article assumes that you have read my article on what a robots.txt file is and how you can manually create it. If you missed the article, it is available at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?4901&robots.htm

I would recommend that you download the trial version of the Standard Edition. The Limited edition does not support as many search engines as the Standard Edition.

Once you have downloaded Robogen and installed it in your hard drive, start the program. Here are the steps that you should follow to create a robots.txt file:

Step 1: Click on the Logon FTP Server button. In the dialog box that appears, type in the address of the FTP server for your web site, make sure that the “This server requires me to log in” option is checked, and then type in the username and the password which you use to access the server in the appropriate boxes.

Now, depending on how your web host has set up the server, the files for your web site may be present in the root directory of the server itself. Or, it may be present in a sub-directory of the root directory. In the latter case, click on the “Use specified root” option and type the relevant sub-directory in the text box besides the option. If you don’t know in which sub-directory the files for your web site are present, ask your web host to give it to you.

Done? Now click on OK. After a while, Robogen will display the directories and files which are present in your site in the right pane of the main Robogen program window. If you find that Robogen has not displayed the files in your site, it means that you did not enter the correct sub-directory in which the files of your web site are present. In this case, ask you web host to give the correct sub-directory to you.

Step 2: In the left pane of the main Robogen window, click on the small button present to the right of the drop-down combo box at the top. In the menu that appears, select “Popular Search Engines”.

Step 3: Now, click on the drop-down combo box and choose the search engine that you are targeting (say, AltaVista). In the right pane, select a page which is NOT meant for AltaVista. Now click on the “< <<" button. You will find that the file which you had selected in the right pane is now present in the left pane. In this way, click on each of the pages which are not meant for AltaVista and press the "<<<" button.

Repeat step 3 for each of the search engines that you are targeting. Just select the search engine that you are targeting from the drop-down combo box, select the pages which are not meant for the search engine one by one from the right pane, and click on the “< <<" button after clicking on each age. Repeat this process for all the search engines that you are targeting.

Step 4: Upload the file to your server using the “Upload Robots.Txt” button. If you want, you can also use the Save menu item from the File menu to save a copy of the robots.txt file in your hard drive.

Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra’s company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://the-easy-way.com/main.html For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to
http://the-easy-way.com/newsletter.html

About the Author

Sumantra Roy is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra’s company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://the-easy-way.com/main.html For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to
http://the-easy-way.com/newsletter.html

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
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You might be trying to decide whether you want to host your website yourself rather than pay a hosting company. Maybe you just want to learn how it is done, or you want to save some money by doing it yourself. In this article I’ll discuss the most important part of hosting your website from home, the web server.

The word “server” sounds scary and because of this many people think only a professional hosting company can host a website. This is not true. A server is nothing more than software that runs in the background listening to requests from “clients.” The client in our case is an internet browser, like Internet Explorer.

How do you get a web server? Most Windows operating sytems come with a web server that just needs to be installed. There are also web servers than can be downloaded for free, like Apache. I’m not going to go over how to do this. In this article I’ll discuss the concepts and what’s needed to get your web server up and running and serving your site to the public after it’s been installed. Every web server is different but the concepts are the same. By going over the general concepts that are true for any web server, you’ll know what to look for regardless of the software you are using.

Like I mentioned before, a server is just software that runs in the background. A web server is a server that listens to requests from internet browsers for a specific page, finds that page in the computer it is running on and then sends it to the browser that requested it. Keeping this in mind, can you believe there are actually just two things you need to do to have your web server configured?

1) Tell your web server where to find your web site. Your website probably consists of multiple pages. You need to tell the web server the path of the folder where you keep your pages. For example, when someone types www.yourdomain.com/main.html, the server will look in the folder where all your pages live, and look for file main.html.

2) Tell your web server about your default page. This is the page that is displayed when someone types www.yourdomain.com in their browser without specifying a page. The web server already has some default page names like “index.html” so if you have a page with this name it will be displayed by default when no document is specified in the request. You may also add some more default file names to your web server. If you don’t want to name your file “index.html” you can tell your web server that your default page’s name is “mainpage.htm.”

This is basically all there is to configuring your web server. Although web servers have a lot of other features and settings, these are the two basic steps that will allow your web server to start serving your website. Of course, there is more to hosting your website from home, like getting a domain name, dealing with your router, but these topics are beyond the scope of this article.

I hope I’ve convinced you of how easy it is to set up a web server, which happens to be the most important step to hosting your website from home.

About the Author: For more information on setting up a web server and hosting your website from home please visit http://www.webhostingsteps.com

Source: www.isnare.com

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
-

Proxy server is the software installed on some network server. The main purpose of this software is to relay traffic between two network hosts (client and server), sometimes this software does some data caching (usually this is performed by HTTP proxies). If your browser is configured to work through the proxy server then all your network traffic will go through that proxy server.

The main purposes of proxy servers:

* Transfer speed improvement (in case of caching proxies). You may use your ISP’s proxy to access the internet ?usually you have better connection to your ISP’s proxy than to other hosts, if this proxy has the resource you requested from the internet you will get a copy of it from proxy (from its cache).

* Security and privacy (for HTTP). Anonymous proxies hide information about your computer in the request headers, so you can safely surf the net and your information will never be used in any way.

* LAN interconnection (or LAN to WAN connection). Sometimes you experience some problems while accessing the server located in the other network (for example in the internet).

How to setup your browser for proxy access:

To set up your web browser follow the intructions below. You have to replace and with the proxy address and its port. It is preferred to use an IP address instead of proxy’s hostname to avoid the name resolution that your browser will perform in case of hostname usage. Examples:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later

1) Choose the Tools menu.
2) Select Internet Options.
3) Select Connections.
4) Select LAN Settings.
5) Check “Use a proxy server”.
6) Enter in the “Address” text box.
7) Enter in the “Port” text box.
8) Press “Apply”.
9) Press “OK”.

Netscape Communicator(Navigator) v4.0 and higher

1) Choose the Edit menu.
2) Select Preferences.
3) Select Advanced->Proxies.
4) Check “Manual Proxy Configuration”.
5) Click “View…”.
6) Set the appropriate fields to and values, it depends on proxy type you want to use.

There are 3 levels of HTTP proxies:

* Level 1: High anonymous (elite) proxies. Such proxies don’t change request fields and look like real IP. You real IP is hidden of course. People that administrating internet servers will think that you are not using any proxies.

* Level 2: Anonymous proxies also don’t show your real IP but change the request fields, so it’s possible to detect that proxy with log analyzing. Nothing really matters, but some server administrators restrict the proxy requests.

* Level 3: Transparent proxies (not anonymous, simply HTTP) change the request fields, also they transfer real IP. Such proxies are not applicable for security and privacy while surfing on net. You can use them only for network speed improvement.

How to know the level of the proxy?

Forum Proxy Leecher (fpl.my-proxy.com) is an an intelligent proxy leecher that can get proxies from forums, however it’s also a good proxy tester to check the level of the proxies. It’s especially useful if you want to test a great amount of proxies. Download it at http://fpl.my-proxy.com/FPL_setup.exe.

Proxy Chain

You can use several proxy servers simultaneously. It is called “cascaded proxies”. Use the following settings in your browser: http://proxyA:portA/http://proxyB:portB/. But you may expect some speed loss in this way.

Some Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) information

HTTP is a high level (application level) protocol which provides the speed you need and quality data transfer. HTTP based on request/response mechanism. The requesting application (client) establishes the connection between you and server. It sends the request to the server in the following form: request method, URI (uniform resource identifier), protocol version, MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) coded message witch contains service information, client information and sometimes message body. Server processes the request and answers with a message which contains status string followed by the MIME coded message.

We can see that client sends to server the great amount of information including the information about itself. This information we are interested in ?it is called request fields. The header of request consists of the following fields (only those we are interested in): Pragma, Forwarded, Client IP, Via, X-Forwarded For, Proxy-Connection, Remote Address. These fields cause the privacy leak. Elite proxies correct this fields to bring you maximum privacy.

SOCKS proxies

SOCKS is a protocol that relays TCP sessions at a firewall host to allow application users transparent access across the firewall. Because the protocol is independent of application protocols, it can be (and has been) used for many different services, such as telnet, ftp, finger, whois, gopher, WWW, etc. Access control can be applied at the beginning of each TCP session; thereafter the server simply relays the data between the client and the application server, incurring minimum processing overhead. Since SOCKS never has to know anything about the application protocol, it should also be easy for it to accommodate applications which use encryption to protect their traffic from nosey snoopers. No information about the client is sent to the server. Thus there is no need to test the anonymity level of the SOCKS proxies.

About The Author

Terry Steele, the webmaster of My-Proxy (www.my-proxy.com), home of free security knowledge, online security tools and proxy softwares.