Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By : Aivaliotis
Book Image

Mastering NGINX - Second Edition

By: Aivaliotis

Overview of this book

NGINX is a high-performance HTTP server and mail proxy designed to use very few system resources. But despite its power it is often a challenge to properly configure NGINX to meet your expectations. Mastering Nginx is the solution – an insider’s guide that will clarify the murky waters of NGINX’s configuration. Tune NGINX for various situations, improve your NGINX experience with some of the more obscure configuration directives, and discover how to design and personalize a configuration to match your needs. To begin with, quickly brush up on installing and setting up the NGINX server on the OS and its integration with third-party modules. From here, move on to explain NGINX's mail proxy module and its authentication, and reverse proxy to solve scaling issues. Then see how to integrate NGINX with your applications to perform tasks. The latter part of the book focuses on working through techniques to solve common web issues and the know-hows using NGINX modules. Finally, we will also explore different configurations that will help you troubleshoot NGINX server and assist with performance tuning.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
10
A. Directive Reference
13
D. Persisting Solaris Network Tunings
14
Index

Authentication service

We mentioned the authentication service quite a few times in the previous section, but what exactly is the authentication service and what does it do? When a user makes a POP3, IMAP, or SMTP request to NGINX, authenticating the connection is one of the first steps. NGINX does not perform this authentication itself, but rather makes a query to an authentication service that will fulfill the request. NGINX then uses the response from the authentication service to make the connection to the upstream mail server.

This authentication service may be written in any language. It need only conform to the authentication protocol required by NGINX. The protocol is similar to HTTP, so it will be fairly easy for us to write our own authentication service.

NGINX will send the following headers in its request to the authentication service:

  • Host
  • Auth-Method
  • Auth-User
  • Auth-Pass
  • Auth-Salt
  • Auth-Protocol
  • Auth-Login-Attempt
  • Client-IP
  • Client-Host
  • Auth-SMTP-Helo
  • Auth-SMTP-From
  • Auth-SMTP-To

The meaning...