How to determine type of server on a remote machine
I have a virtual hosting of my Rails web-site and i need to determine type of server, that acts as front-end.
They say, that Apache is not used as a front-end server, but i need to check it somehow.
Is this possible ? Maybe some terminal command ?
Answer
If I understand your question correction, you are trying to determine the type of web server that is serving your files, correct? If so, use a tool like Fiddler (a stand-alone freeware app) or FireBug (free plug-in for FireFox) to view the HTTP responses coming from the server. In most cases you will see an HTTP header called "Server" that contains a description of the server being used. For example (from cnn.com):
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:24:46 GMT
Expires: Mon, 04 Apr 2011 05:21:59 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:42:35 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Accept-Ranges: bytes
**Server: Apache**
Content-Length: 1907
...or for another example, from brinkster.com:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:28:02 GMT
**Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0**
Set-Cookie: BrinksterM1=2; HttpOnly
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 44943
You may or may not get specific versions, etc. of the server--it depends on what information the server provides--but it would be a very quick, free way way to check and would probably be the first step I would take.