In my recent project, I was required to open up a portion of an Intranet web application to external customer. I was researching for options.

Yes, IIS7 has an Application Request Routing extension. But since my public facing server is Windows 2003 Server, IIS7 was out.

Then I read Karl Seguin’s post on using NGINX to improve ASP.NET Performance. So I said to myself, let’s get dirty on this

My first step was to download VMWare Player. Why VMWare Player? Mainly because it’s free. You just need to register, activate VMWare account, then grab the installer.

Next step is to download Ubuntu Server VMWare image. Visit http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ and grab a copy.

By now I believe you already run the Ubuntu server in VMWare Player.

1. Login as ‘notroot’. Password: ‘thoughtpolice’
2. Download Nginx source code. Command: wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.0.4.tar.gz
3. Follow the following commands to extract the archive:
   1. gunzip nginx-1.0.4.tar.gz
   2. tar -xf nginx-1.0.4.tar
4. Follow the following commands to install the required runtime libraries:
   1. sudo -s
   2. apt-get update
   3. apt-get install gcc
   4. apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
   5. apt-get install zlib1g-dev
   6. exit
5. Follow the following commands to build nginx:
   1. cd nginx-1.0.4
   2. ./configure
   3. sudo make install

By now you should have NGINX installed to /usr/local/nginx. You could now edit the configuration in /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf. If you’re not sure how, NGINX’s documentation have section with many examples on how to configure NGINX. Editing the .conf is done using vi, so iIf you’re unfamiliar with vi, you could read a simple intro here.

Have fun!

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