I've always been a fan of IIS....no, it's true. It has a nasty reputation for being insecure, and in some ways, it's not unearned. Problem is, it's easy to secure, it just don't come that way out of the box! Any admin that tells you IIS ain't secure has no idea what they're doing...especially if they went and put an IIS box on the web! If you don't think it's secure, why are you using it??
Anywho, I'll get to the details later, but I'm in the process of revamping the makeup of my home network. One of the phases of the project has me kind of replacing IIS with Apache. Mainly because most of the apps I run on my IIS server are PHP, so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to not use Apache...
Anyway, I found this site with some fella who've written some really cools mods for Apache at Tangent.
Immediately on reading their site, I saw so many uses:
mod_mp3: turns the Apache Web server into an MP3 or Ogg streaming server. Fantastic! This server's going to be my "media server" and house all of my MP3s anyway! This'll give me the ability to listen to my collection at work where I only have outgoing access to port 80! Nifty!
mod_layout: provides both a Footer and Header directive to automagically include output from other URIs at the beginning and ending of a Web page. Brilliant! The main reason I run a webserver is to give me access to some of my data that I'd like available everywhere, such as phprecipebook and SiteBar. Now, I can create a "master" page with an iframe generated automatically with links to all of these tools so I can switch back and forth with ease. I had planned on doing this manually, but this'll make life easier!
mod_trigger: gives you hooks into each Apache request to launch triggers if certain actions occur. Great! I run a webmail app, I can have Apache send me a mail or some other alert if someone tries to access it. I can write a script that'll exclude domains I normally come from (like work) to cut down on alerts.
MyXML: an UDF extension to the MySQL database. I can't think of a specific use for this at the moment, but I've had a couple of incidents where it would have been nice to be able to generate XML from a database without all the typical work involved.
Very nice stuff, really. Anyone got any other favorite Apache mods they wanna share?
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