Casting Net

What if your company invested in some elaborate ASP.NET web applications back in the days before they discovered Linux? What if your heterogeneous environment requires that the same dynamic pages run on multiple platforms? Do you need to ditch your Linux Apache web server just to serve up web content developed for Microsoft's .NET framework?

The Mono Project [1] has been hard at work on the problem of supporting the .NET framework in Linux, and part of their attention has been on the issue of ASP.NET. Mono now offers an Apache module known as Mod_Mono for hosting ASP-based .NET web applications from Apache servers [2]. In this article, I take a quick look at how to set up your Apache server to support ASP.NET. Of course, this discussion isn't intended as a complete tutorial on setting up Apache – a subject that could easily fill a very large book – but if you already have some basic knowledge of Apache configuration, read on for more on bringing .NET to your web environment.

When you install Mod_Mono, it is a good idea to use the package provided by your distro. On Ubuntu and Debian systems, look for libapache2-mod-mono, and for Fedora, use mod_mono plus mono-web. Also, you will need the XSP package. In Fedora, you must install XSP from rawhide; in Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros, install XSP directly as a package dependency. (If you prefer, you can install Mod_Mono from source [2], but keep in mind that you're less likely to run into compatibility issues if you use a package.)

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