Hiawatha webserver

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Hiawatha
Genre	Web server
License	GNU GPL
Website	hiawatha.leisink.org

Hiawatha is a secure webserver for Unix. It has been written with 'being secure' as its main goal.

1 History
2 Features
3 Performance
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] History

Hiawatha started in January 2002 as a very small webserver, suitable for servers with old hardware. It was written for internet servers in student houses in Delft. Because the author was a computer science student with special interest in IT security, all sorts of experimental security features were included. This resulted in a webserver with many interesting security features which are proven useful.

Main releases

1.0: September 2002. A basic but functional webserver.
2.0: March 2004. Use of multithreading instead of forking.
3.0: September 2004. SSL support.
4.0: December 2005. A CGI-wrapper for improved security was included.
5.0: October 2006. FastCGI support for improved CGI speed.
6.0: October 2007. IPv6 support.

[edit] Features

Hiawatha has many security features that no other webserver has, like preventing SQL-injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), banning of potential hackers and limiting the runtime of your CGI applications.^[1]

[edit] Performance

Although security is the main focus of this webserver, Hiawatha has excellent performance. Hiawatha is twice as fast as Apache for static content. Hiawatha supports load-balanced FastCGI, which makes it fast and scalable for handling dynamic content. For example lolikun.org ^[2] hosts several websites though virtual hosts and each of them easily handling over 50000 hits per day by utilizing Hiawatha with PHP FastCGI on the FreeBSD operating system. Hiawatha is very easy to setup and configure(unlike other webservers's complicated bug prone and bloated configurations). Hiawatha allows running PHP scripts with FastCGI allowing the load to be distrubuted amost several FastCGI servers and running the php scripts under different user and group credentials allowing for more granular file permissions and security.