The sys admin's daily grind – Gatling

Apache Under Fire

Article from Issue 183/2016
Author(s):

Western aficionados and sys admin Charly are about to set up a Gatling in a field that is normally home to Apache. Read on to discover why blogger Fefe is to blame.

I admit to watching (too) many westerns as a child; in other words, I'm fully aware of what a Gatling gun is: an automatic weapon with multiple rotating barrels. In old movies, soldiers used its infernal din to send the horses of attacking Apaches galloping mad. And, this always worked until an Apache warrior crept up from behind and torched the ammunition chest.

As a rapid fire weapon, the Gatling lends its name to the web server I will be looking at today. The server's binary file is a lightweight compared with its name giver, weighing in at just 100KB. Its RAM requirements are minimal, too, because Gatling [1] does not fork. On an old PC, Gatling is just as fast as on my Raspberry Pi. The daemon is even included with the plain vanilla Raspbian distribution.

The server is designed for delivering static web pages as quickly as possible. To allow this to happen, its programmer, Felix "Fefe" von Leitner, whose widely read blog [2] naturally also runs on Gatling, gave the server just as many features as the number of shells you could slot into a revolver (IPv6, TLS/SSL, simply equipped virtual hosts, login via the .htaccess mechanism).

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Charly's Column

    Parallel SSH is the name of an easy-to-configure tool that our resident sys admin, Charly, now routinely deploys whenever he needs to launch the same programs, copy the same files, or kill the same processes simultaneously on multiple computers.

    more »
  • Highway Through Hell

    When digging into BGP routing information, Charly avoids the highway through parameter hell thanks to the ASN tool. In addition to a system's AS number, ASN delivers other information, such as its peering partners upstream and downstream.

    more »
  • Charly's Column

    Some of Charly’s servers run the SSH daemon on port 443 rather than on the standard port 22. If an SSL-capable Apache web server starts causing trouble, his method of settling the dispute is sslh.

    more »
  • Charly's Column: Miniflux

    Sys admin Charly Kühnast typically follows 40 to 50 RSS feeds using Tiny Tiny RSS on his own server. Now, the good times spent with the faithful Tiny are coming to an end. Read on to discover the whole story.

    more »
  • Charly's Column

    What does Charly’s recent two-week vacation in Holland have in common with an SSH session? Nothing at all, at first sight. And therein lies a tale.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Digital Autonomy

• The Answer Was Already on the Shelf
• Changing the Chip Industry: How Public Investment Has Grown Open Silicon
• United Nations Open Source Portal Goes Live
• EU Open Source Strategy Plays Key Role in Tech Sovereignty Package
• France Says “Au Revoir” to Microsoft

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source