The IBM Internet Connection Server provides the foundation for building your company's presence on the Internet. Businesses can use the IBM Internet Connection Server on the World Wide Web to reach customers and suppliers around the world, or they can use it within an enterprise to communicate with employees. Following are descriptions of some of the key features of the Internet Connection Server.
You can easily install Internet Connection Server using the NT installation tool, InstallShield.
After you install Internet Connection Server, you can start it using the default configuration. Using a Web browser, you can then connect to the server.
By default, your server uses the Internet Connection Server Front Page as its home page. The front page provides a valuable assortment of tools and information, including links to:
The Internet Connection Server supports the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which allows you to create external programs (CGI programs) that interface with your server and perform tasks such as searching and forwarding e-mail messages.
To assist you in writing CGI programs, the Internet Connection Server includes utilities for extracting forms data, writing document headers, and processing image maps.
Most likely, you will not want everyone to be able to access all the information on your server. For example, you probably would not want everyone to be able to access your CGI programs.
The Internet Connection Server allows you to restrict access based on user name and password, or the address of the requester. Access authorization is controlled using the configuration file and possibly one or more other files, including:
The Internet Connection Server allows you to create a virtual hierarchy of Web resources. As part of the Internet Connection Server configuration, you can specify resource mapping rules, which associate a request template with the actual path to a document or resource. Each request that comes to the server is checked against these rules to determine if the request should be accepted and where the requested resource is actually located.
To help you determine whether or not your Internet message is reaching the intended audience, the Internet Connection Server lets you keep logs showing who is accessing your server and when. You can also keep logs of requests for cached files (if the server is a caching proxy), and logs of internal server errors.
Because the logs are written in a format that is common to most Web servers, you can use any of several generic statistical programs to analyze the log contents.
The Internet Connection Server can be configured as a caching proxy server. This will improve performance, as well as allow users of your internal network to access documents on the Internet.
The Internet Connection Server allows you to specify many configuration options for a caching proxy, including: