DAEMON!

The magazine for people who like BIG WEB SERVERS


DAEMON! is your regular HTTP packet carrying features and articles on the only thing that matters in your life: coping with more hits than any one planet could ever generate. If your idea of social justice is herding Internet Explorer users into cattle trucks, if you've been to jail for your belief in highly optimised Perl, and if you feel that bigger is not only better, it's a sign of rampant fertility, you won't want to miss a single issue of DAEMON!

This month's contents

Cover Story

War And Pieces
When Bob Schmidt first ran his new CGI script, it killed his boss, destroyed his workplace and took his wife and children hostage. Six months later as he attempts to rebuild his shattered life, he tells DAEMON! why he doesn't regret any of it.

Features

Bend Over And Take It Like A Man
Six Webmeisters tell us why they get off on running big Web servers.
Crawling Up The Greasy Pipe()
Melissa Frodenburg used to surf the net with Enhanced Mosaic under Windows 3.1. Now she routes mains electricity through the North American backbone to sites that use Netscape extensions in their HTML. Editor Sam Wheatley dons hardhat and riot shield and dares to ask her if she still wears short skirts.
Content Schmontent
Dan Gleisner claims that serving 50Gb Cray core dumps should be good enough for anyone, and blasts sites that try to impart useful information as a bunch of mommies boys wearing ribbons.
Hardwearing Hardware
It took him three years but Joe Mategna finally managed to install Kong httpd on a South American nuclear power plant. Now he's holding the whole country to ransom and gets as much cocaine as he wants. He tells us why PC-based Web serving is for pussies and what sort of high-end kit you should really be looking at, including spy satellites, broadcast stations and armoured personnel carriers.
Death To All Infidels
After watching his gateway router go up in flames, killing a junior technician, Fred Forshaw's resolve stiffened and so did a few other things. The latest iteration of his Krakatoa httpd regularly claims the lives of pale, young network engineers. He reveals his secret TCP parameters and promises to shoot in cold blood anyone who steals them.
DO IT Yourself
When Dave Teharny first ran NCSA 1.3, he worried that its performance would attract glances from butch men in leather. So he rewired it. Now it demands regular sacrifices of firstborn sons just to rotate the logs.

Reviews

Die Monster Die
Phillip van Weasel of BrownPants Corp introduces the company's latest Web daemon and promises it will take out your entire network for six weeks.
There Goes The Neighbourhood
DAEMON! roadtests six httpds running under FreeBSD and then soaks the hardware in gasoline and torches it because no one could stop us.
Me And A Gun
Gaping Hole Ltd promise that when their Viking WebCrawler visits your site, it doesn't just index the content, it rapes and pillages it. Mad Joe Johnson runs it against ten of his least favourite sites and speculates that it may be like watching everything you ever cared about in the world being napalmed while you're tied up and helpless to do anything.

Regulars

News
Madbastard Technologies chairman eats five Pentium servers at launch of new product; FatPipe Inc says, "Come and try our new server if you think you're 'ard enough!"; Plus: why still running Apache probably means you're impotent and were bullied at school.
Letters
Why defending the right to bear arms goes with running a big Web server; CERN line browser is still the best; Plus: are all Apache users big girls in gingham?
Talking Dirtywith the Sunabomber
This month the man who watches Lynx users bleed to death for kicks shows you how to code Perl objects with a little assistance from Satan.
Grumpy, Self-opiniated Troll
Zak Mularky, our resident columnist, looks forward to the forthcoming meltdown of the entire Internet when he boots up his latest search engine, and explains why Netscape developers can suck his parts.
Big End Piece
Industry gossip: does Bill Gates need supervising on the toilet? Plus: we join the Madbastard Technologies board on a night out in downtown Beirut, snortin', whorin' and killin'. In our regular cartoon, Vic Virus rips through the IBM LAN and totals their European Software Development Center, putting thousands out of work.

Plus, next month:

DAEMON!, every month at your newsagent. The magazine for real men - real Webmasters.


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