Group items tagged

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol for interfacing external application software with an information server, commonly a web server. The task of such an information server is to respond to requests (in the case of web servers, requests from client web browsers) by returning output. Each time a request is received, the server analyzes what the request asks for, and returns the appropriate output. The two basic methods for the server to do this are the following: If the request identifies a file stored on disk, then return the contents of that file. If the request identifies an executable command and possibly arguments, then run the command and return its output. CGI defines a standard way of doing the second. It defines how information about the server and the request is passed to the command in the form of arguments and environment variables, and how the command can pass back extra information about the output (such as the type) in the form of headers.

These headers tell us which web server you were trying to contact.  If that seems odd, bear in mind that many web sites can be "hosted" on a single server, so when the request is received it needs to know which web site you were attempting to access

The request method is usually either "GET" or "POST".  Basically if you fill in and submit a form on a web page it might generate a POST request (or it might be "GET"), whereas if you just click on a link, or activate one of your browser's "bookmarks" or "favourites", then the request method will always be "GET". Therefore, if it's "POST", we can tell that a form was definitely submitted.  The contents of the form would appear here, and there would also be some "Content-" headers describing the data. Web browsers generate two kinds of "POST" data: either "multipart/form-data", which is used when uploading files to a web server, or the more common "application/x-www-form-urlencoded".

The "referer" header tells us which document referred you to us - in essence, if you followed a link to get to this page, it is the URL of the page you came from to get here.

In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.[1] For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. An analogous meaning is implied when the word is used in a commercial context, where scalability of a company implies that the underlying business model offers the potential for economic growth within the company.

What is Domain Name Resolution Introduction When using the Internet most people connect to web sites, ftp servers or other Internet servers by connecting to a domain name, as in www.bleepingcomputer.com. Internet applications, though, do not communicate via domain names, but rather using IP addresses, such as 192.168.1.1. Therefore when you type a domain name in your program that you wish to connect to, your application must first convert it to an IP address that it will use to connect to. The way these hostnames are resolved to their mapped IP address is called Domain Name Resolution. On almost all operating systems whether they be Apple, Linux, Unix, Netware, or Windows the majority of resolutions from domain names to IP addresses are done through a procedure called DNS.

Hosts File - There is a file called the HOSTS file that you can use to convert domain names to IP addresses. Entries in the HOSTS file override any mappings that would be resolved via a DNS server

Netbios - This only applies to Windows machines and will only be used to map names to IP addresses if all previous methods failed. This method will attempt to map the netbios name you are trying to connect to with an IP address.

It's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.