Running a WWW Server

Run Public WWW Server

If set to YES, then a publicly accessible HTTP service will be run on the firewall on port 80. This can be simply a relay to some other host on the internal network or in the DMZ, or it can be be an HTTP server on the firewall itself.

Host

If the public HTTP service is simply a relay, then the IP address of the real server should be entered here. If an HTTP server is to be run on the firewall itself then this field should be left blank.

If you enable the public WWW service and don't specify a host IP address, a CERN httpd daemon will automatically be run to provide the service. This is a separate HTTP daemon to the one that is run as a proxy caching server for proxy WWW access from internal hosts/nets. The daemon will run chrooted in the /usr/local/www directory. You can put your publicly accessible HTML files in /usr/local/www/local, and your CGI scripts in /usr/local/www/local/bin.

If the firewall provides a name service, it will automatically include a www.domain entry pointing to itself when the public web service is enabled. Unless your firewall is providing the external name service for your domain, you may want your ISP to also provide such an address record to the Internet pointing to your firewall.

It may happen that you already have Web home pages for your organisation being kept by your ISP, with a virtual domain `www.organisation' visible on the Internet pointing to an address in your ISP's network space. In this case you should not run the public WWW service. In order to access your home pages from behind the firewall you should make an entry in the Local Hosts Setup Screen (Figure 4.8) associating the name `www.organisation' with the appropriate external address.