Apache Interview Questions And Answers

Apache is a freely available Web server that is distributed
under an "open source" license. Version 2.0 runs on most
Unix-based operating systems (such as Linux, Solaris,
Digital UNIX, and AIX), on other UNIX/POSIX-derived systems
(such as Rhapsody, BeOS, and BS2000/OSD), on AmigaOS, and on
Windows 2000. According to the Netcraft (www.netcraft.com)
Web server survey in February, 2001, 60% of all Web sites on
the Internet are using Apache (62% including Apache
derivatives), making Apache more widely used than all other
Web servers combined.

Yes, It acts as proxy also by using the mod_proxy module.

A MultiViews search is enabled by the MultiViews Options.
If the server receives a request for /some/dir/foo and
/some/dir/foo does not exist, then the server reads the
directory looking for all files named foo.*, and effectively
fakes up a type map which names all those files, assigning
them the same media types and content-encodings it would
have if the client had asked for one of them by name. It
then chooses the best match to the client's requirements,
and returns that document.

Yes, Apache contain a Search engine.
You can search a report name in Apache by using the "Search
title".

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) data transport requires
encryption, and many governments have restrictions upon the
import, export, and use of encryption technology.

If Apache included SSL in the base package, its
distribution would involve all sorts of legal and
bureaucratic issues, and it would no longer be freely
available.

Also, some of the technology required to talk to current
clients using SSL is patented by RSA Data Security, who
restricts its use without a license.

No. Apache is a Web (HTTP) server, not an application
server. The base package does not include any such
functionality. See the PHP project and the mod_perl project
for examples of modules that allow you to work with
databases from within the Apache environment.

The base Apache Web server package does not include support
for Java

Apache Web Server package does not include ASP support.

However, a number of projects provide ASP or ASP-like
functionality for Apache. Some of these are:

Apache::ASP

mod_mono

The first two are remnants from the NCSA times, and
generally you should be ok if you delete the first two, and
stick with httpd.conf.

To stop apache you can use.

/etc/init.d/httpd stop command.

Gracefully restarts the Apache httpd daemon. If the
daemon is not running, it is started. This differs from a
normal restart in that currently open connections are
not aborted. A side effect is that old log files will not
be closed immediately. This means that if used in a log
rotation script, a substantial delay may be necessary to
ensure that the old log files are closed before
processing them. This command automatically checks
the configuration files as in configtest before
initiating the restart to make sure Apache doesn?t die.
This is equivalent to apachectl -k graceful.

( excerpt from manual page of apachectl )

Actually it sends a SIGUSR1 for a restart. The USR1 or
graceful signal causes the parent process to advise the
children to exit after their current request (or to exit
immediately if they're not serving anything). The parent
re-reads its configuration files and re-opens its log files.
As each child dies off the parent replaces it with a child
from the new generation of the configuration, which begins
serving new requests immediately.

We can check syntax for httpd configuration file by using
following command.

httpd -S

apache provide two type of virtual hosting 1- ip based and
2- name based.
to configure name based your dns should work properly.
go to the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and remove # from
the start of of Namevertualhost *:80
and than at the end of file write the content below

<VirtualHost "IP of your apache server":80>
ServerAdmin root@krishna.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/krishna/krishna.html
DirectoryIndex krishna.html
ServerName www.krishna.com
ErrorLog /home/apache/logs/error/hostedsites/error_log
TransferLog /home/apache/logs/access/hostedsites/access_log
</VirtualHost>
restart your httpd service by running the command
Service httpd restart or /etc/init.d/httpd restart

It defines whether Apache should spawn itself as a child
process (standalone) or keep everything in a single process
(inetd). Keeping it inetd conserves resources. This is
deprecated, however.

This module creates dynamically configured virtual hosts, by
allowing the IP address and/or the Host: header of the HTTP
request to be used as part of the pathname to determine what
files to serve. This allows for easy use of a huge number of
virtual hosts with similar configurations.

htpasswd is used for allowing user to authenticate for a
particular web page. such as you are running 2 or more web
pages through virtual hosting or any other method and want
to provide access for any user to access a particular page
with authentication then you can use the htpasswd for
creating user authentication file. when you run the command
htpasswd with the option -c and -m for any user it will
create a file named htpasswd in which an entry for user name
and encrypted passswd will create.

No.root process opens port 80, but never listens to it, so
no user will actually enter the site with root rights. If
you kill the root process, you will see the other kids
disappear as well.

A struts is a open source framework for creating a Java web
applications

Java applications are not stored in Apache, it can be only
connected to a other Java webapp hosting webserver using the
mod_jk connector

We can configure logs in httpd in httpd.conf under log module.