Netscape's Big Enterprise Push
By Ahmad Abualsamid
With its latest release of Enterprise Server, Netscape Communications Corp. renews its commitment to enterprise computing and puts forth a tremendous effort to ensure that its product is the benchmark for future Web servers. A part of Netscape SuiteSpot, Enterprise Server 3.0 incorporates a new revision-control system, designed
by Mortice Kern Systems, that lets network administrators keep track of different versions of a Web page. With Web Publisher Java applet, and its associated plug-in (accessible at /WebPub off the server), you can work your magic in Web publishing. The applet provides a list of all files accessible off the Web server. You can then publish to t
hose files (replacing them), publish new files, set access permissions, assign properties and perform file manipulations operations--copy/rename/move/ delete/. Version 3.0 also offers native connectivity to Oracle, Sybase and Informix databases.
We tested a beta version of Enterprise Server 3.0, which wil
l be available for SunSoft Solaris and Windows NT, and found it easy to install and configure at Network Computing's lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We were also impressed with its manageability. We ran a few simple performance measures and did not experience any bottlenecks or performance problems.
Enterprise Server has all the bells and whistles you'd expect in a Web server--and then some. Netscape borrows user and group management from Unix and revision control from traditional programming tools to create a powerful enterprise-document publishing system.
With its access-control lists, Enterprise Server lets you create groups that have various read/write/lock permissions over fi
les in the document tree. You can create users and add them to various groups, which control various files and directories in the document tree. These groups are different from the user accounts that may exist on the Unix server or any HTTP authentication users who have "read" access to documents on the server. Once groups are set up, each group of users can publish its own Web pages, keep different versions of the pages in an archive tree--which resembles the original document tree--and use advanced revision-control system techniques to maintain the group's portion of the site.
Up and Running
We installed the server software for Solaris on a SPARCserver 20 running two processors and equipped with 192 MB of memory. The setup program took care of most details, but some Unix system administration skills were necessary. For programming gurus, the server uses both processes and the lighter-weight threads. Netscape recommends configuring the server to start as many processes as there are available ph
ysical processors in the system. Our SPARCserver has two processors, so we configured Enterprise Server 3.0 accordingly. Each of the processors can start up multiple threads for better performance. One caveat: Enterprise Server is no lightweight; it will consume a great amount of memory. We would not recommend tryi
ng to run it on a computer that is already doing other activities, such as a mail spooler or a file server. A dedicated server would be best.
Once the server was installed, we fired up Navigator 4 and started configuring our first Web server. (Enterprise Server supports multiple virtual servers.) Gone are the days of worrying about configuration files, which file controls what, and how to set it all up to get the Web server up and running. With JavaScript and HTML forms, you can configure anything, anytime. The main configuration menu, which has a slew of submenus, includes System Settings, Access Control, Encryption, Programs, Server Status, Configuration Styles, Content Management, Web Publis
hing, Index Documents and Automatic Cataloging.
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