Good Apache security references? - security

I've got an issue with Apache and Single Sign-on, which I cannot work out without good references as I am not a pro in Apache configuration. I tried to search in Amazon.com and found the matched book: Apache security has only three pages for this topic so I don't think it as a good reference in this case.
I am going to set up Apache test environment right now and will load the necessary modules, but I wonder if there is any good materials that I could follow? Of course I would search and Read The Fine Manuals from Apache website.
Many thanks to the suggestions in advance.

Hi i like this one "Preventing Web Attacks with Apache" Author: Ryan C Barnett
http://www.amazon.com/Preventing-Attacks-Apache-Ryan-Barnett/dp/0321321286
and this small article http://www.petefreitag.com/item/505.cfm

Related

Creating a Windows Script Host Language

Ok, I know I've asked this in the past (and can no longer find that question), and I know I personally have seen many useful articles, documentation and tutorials on how to do this - yet I can no longer find a single one of them on Google. So, please refrain from marking as a duplicate, unless it really does answer my question.
How can I create my own Windows Scripting Host Language? (I believe they're called "Engines"), and what tools and resources are available to aid in this journey? And is there more than one way to go about it, or are there different approaches that we can take to accomplish this?
Starters for theory:
Windows Script Interfaces Reference
Starters for implementation:
How to add support for hosing VBScript to your MFC application (dated/stale)
Where to steal from:
Sources of ActiveState's Perl/Python script engines
LuaScript
Ruby A B

Resource for developing a website

Can anyone recommend resources to learn how to develop websites, as opposed to web applications?
I am looking to develop a website for a consulting company to be precise. I would be more interested in best practices for creating the layout of a website (user appeal, eye candy, not an eye sore)
Thanks
-M
It really depends upon the language you want to use, your current skill sets, who's going to maintain the site, what OS the site will be hosted on etc etc.
I suspect you need to narrow down your question.
What do you mean by web site rather than web application? Are you talking about the dynamic nature of the content or somethign else?
update
If you're looking for discussions on design of websites (visual design, UX etc) then I'm a great fan of Smashing Magazine.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
It doesn't often speak about MS technologies (ASP.NET etc) but it's a great place to see discussions and papers on "what makes a great website". Some recent examples:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/15/optimizing-conversion-rates-its-all-about-usability/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/14/non-profit-website-design-examples-and-best-practices/
Subscribe to their RSS feed and see what those colouring-in people get up to.
Here's your first port of call.
Unless you're artistically inclined, I recommend purchasing or contracting the template design to someone who is skilled in this area.
For $60 a year, you can have unlimited downloads and unlimited use of all the templates at the following site:
http://www.dreamtemplate.com/
There are many more here:
http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates.php
http://www.w3schools.com/
for purely informational sites, html, and css will probably be plenty, though I think I would reccomend using wordpress if you're just trying to put content on the internet
If you speak German or French, http://www.selfhtml.org is quite a good resource.
Otherwise, I would recommend http://www.w3schools.com/ or http://htmldog.com/. Both are very good as they really go deeply into the matter and tell about standards from the beginning.
sitepoint.com
Their best content is packaged in their books, but their articles are good, too. Covers design best-practices and web standards, but also has good tips on the business of web design and managing clients.
You may want to look at the alistapart website.
simply the best I have seen for this.
I would also - since I have just been reminded of it use
http://www.webmonkey.com/
http://w3schools.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/ is a good start.

Embed Google/ Yahoo search into a web site or build your own

I am looking for an opinion on the whether to use Google custom search, Yahoo search builder or build my own for web projects (no more than 100 pages of content). If I should build my own - do you have any fast start kits you could recommend?
Many thanks
Chris
I have had success using OpenSearch for my personal blog.
While working at BigCorp we used dedicated search applicances in yellow boxes, but in your case (around 100 pages) it does not make sense to take such a route.
I would suggest going with either Google Custom Search, or Yahoo Search Builder (as long as they both index your site sufficiently to provide good results).
More often than not, you'll get better results and you don't have to worry about building your own custom engine (or implementing an off the shelf/open source piece of software to do the job for you).
I've used IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition and had fantastic results with it. You are limited to a single index per implementation but it's very fast and easy to integrate with and extensible in terms of search customization. I've used it with a ASP.NET site without issue. A caveat being that it needs to be installed on the server and running as a service so it is out of the question for most shared hosting. It has the index capabilities of general search engines (pdf/html/etc) which is very nice.
Edit:
I forgot to mention that some of the reasons I liked it vs other options is that it is free and doesn't require any additional hardware, just FYI.
The main situation I see Google/Yahoo as being sub-optimal is when your site relies on up-to-the-minute results. You're at the mercy of their crawling policies/speed/etc. If that's okay (and I suspect it will be for most 100ish page sites), use them - the results will be great. If realtime results are important, you may have to bite the bullet and install something locally.
Yahoo boss is cheaper and recommended by many people
I am going to integrate it soon.

mint.com programming technology

Does anyone know what's mint.com's programming language/technology? Are they using Java? .NET? Python? Ruby?
Their site is extremely good and I was just wondering what they've chosen to develop their web site.
Thanks.
P.S. MINT.COM is a Personal Finance Management online application.
P.S. 2: THANKS EVERYONE FOR ANSWERING. I really found every single answer very helpful. Also I am happy I found out about Matt's blog.
I found a job posting for mint.com, this might give some idea about the technology they're using:
http://mint.jobscore.com/jobs/mint/softwareengineerfulltime/c1owZqeQOr3OM4aaWP50_m
Looks like:
Linux or Unix server
Java
Hibernate
MySql database
I'd guess Java
Their front-end marketing site is
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
But the login page is powered by
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Coyote is used with Java-based systems.
I guess Java, by looking at the job openings.
"Looks extremely good" part I guess comes from YUI based on Matt's blog .
There are also some very nice snippets and samples on his blog that are used on mint.com.
I'm guessing they're not using .net as their servers are all running F5 Big-IP or CentOS. Here's the Netcraft report. But it's hard to say what their service is developed on--though job openings are certainly one potential indicator.
According to the Wikipedia article about the founder Aaron Patzer, the alpha version was built with J2EE and mySQL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Patzer

IIS 6 Tuning Guide?

I have been a developer for 10+ years and so far my IIS knowledge is just enough for deploying stuff on it and get it running. Recently I have been playing with IIS 6 and realize the huge difference on the worker process model. I think I would need some good guide to update my knowledge in this area. Any good article/book recommendation?
IIS Tuner is an open source tool for tuning IIS 6, 7 and 7.5
There are several online resources, starting with this one:
Performance Tuning (IIS 6.0)
www.iis.net - central place for everything related to IIS..
I recently came across this which I thought was very good: Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0
David Wang has some great articles on the inner workings of IIS6. For various reasons his blog was split over two sites:
http://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/default.aspx
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com/
And...Tess who is a MS escalation engineer has some amazing articles on debugging and diagnosing badly behaved/perfoming apps:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/default.aspx

Resources