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F E A T U R E

IPlanet Goes Where No Server's Gone Before

June 25, 2001
By Lori MacVittie

Red Hat C2Net Stronghold 3.0

Enterprises that want a fast, reliable Web server with all the niceties of GUI-based management and configuration will find Stronghold a better choice than Apache. Support for SSL is installed with the distribution of Stronghold, eliminating the sometimes painful integration chore of building and configuring SSL modules for Apache. A good move is the replacement of SSLeay with OpenSSL, which is quickly becoming the standard for SSL support in the open-source community. Stronghold also includes a free bundled server certificate from Equifax Secure, a nice plus for those who don't have a server certificate.

With adequate performance, C2Net Stronghold, like most of its competitors, provides support for PERL and PHP3/4 out of the box. SWISH (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans) and WWWWAIS (WWW Wide Area Information Server) provide searching and indexing capabilities. We preferred iPlanet's use of Verity for this particular solution but were glad to see this feature included. Enterprise customers may find the lack of a few key necessities unacceptable: There is no SNMP support out of the box (though it is available via the Apache module mod_snmp), and management of virtual servers is still as painful to implement as ever and not nearly as robust as the solutions provided by Zeus or iPlanet.

Stronghold's detailed performance stats

Click here to enlarge

Java servlet support is configured in the same manner as in the IBM HTTP Server -- and is the method used to configure Apache, of course. By the time we tested Stronghold, we'd configured JServ so many times that we were certain we could do it in our sleep. IBM HTTP Server, like Stronghold, includes SSL support, and configuration was a simple matter of enabling SSL for the server after installing the certificate.

The technical support provided with the distribution is a must-have for the enterprise and makes Stronghold a better choice than its free counterpart, Apache. The documentation, both online and included in the distribution, is head and shoulders above the minimal Roxen WebServer documentation.

C2Net Stronghold, $995. Available: Now. Red Hat, (800) 884-9842, (919) 547-0012; fax (919) 547-0439. www.c2.net

Network Computing technology editor Lori MacVittie has been a software developer and a network administrator. Most recently, she was a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Send your comments on this article to her at lmacvitte@nwc.com.