rgm.FABbnet.net

greetings from the summer home of

I live in Massachusetts. I used to work as a network architect/engineer at a large private bank, and now use the retirement proceeds from that job to finance my real life, which includes writing, reading, music, computer programming, some travel, and in general continuing to be a good little consumer.

As part of my computer interests I maintain various small networks in undisclosed locations, comprising the

And in any case, I'd rather be driving...

the thttpd web server

Any web server named after a rude noise made by a cartoon cat must be virtuous.

introduction

I always like to plug the thttpd web server, one of my favorite pieces of software from one of the Web's greatest friends, Jef Poskanzer.

thttpd documentation

thttpd Home Page: You can find source, documentation, and configuration help here
Acme Labs Home Page: There are some more utilities at the Acme Labs home page, including what is possibly the smallest web server around, micro_httpd, which is all of 150 lines of code!

capability examples

Link to an unprocessed SSI page
Link to a processed page (except it doesn't work... See below)

This link is to a page which provides examples of Server Side Includes. Just to prove that thttpd isn't deficient, here's one that does work on another of my thttpd-powered boxen.

Unlike other we servers which can include CGI directives within a webpage with a shtml extension, thttpd requires a page to be processed through a statically linked CGI program (called ssi) provided by the thttpd install, and your page with dynamic elements has to be linked through it. The link that works actually looks like:

"http://cellarbox.fabbnet.net/cgi-bin/ssi/ssi_exam.htm"

where cellarbox.fabbnet.net/cgi-bin/ssi is the processor program and ssi_exam.htm is the page to be processed. That's all well and good, but it depends on thttpd knowing where the cgi-bin directory is, and liking it. This particular server is one of several 'virtual servers' running in separate directories on the same machine, and I'm pretty sure that the SSI example fails because I don't understand the virtual environment all that well. The working example is from a system that runs a sungle, non-virtualized site... Got it? I don't!

Index example: Indexing, as you can see, works just fine, if you allow it...

thttpd also does redirects but that's not very exciting to demonstrate, because you can't really see it. And besides, I can't get redirects to work at all, on any of my servers. But then again, they've never made much sense to me as a webmaster anyway; why fake out your own links?

other rgm links:

My other web sites include:

The Fine-Arts Bluesband & Poetry Press: My first and most serious site, offering a new poem every month, and assorted other literary goodies. Note the uncanny resemblance between the initials of 'Fine-Arts Bluesband' and 'FABbnet.net.'

I've been writing and self-publishing my own poetry under the Fine-Arts Bluesband imprint for nearly thirty years. My original publication tool was a 6" X 10" Kelsey hand-press. Now it's the web. The domain, fabandpp.org, has been up and active since 1995.

FABbnet: My 'home' network home page, hosted in another undisclosed location. FABbnet.net is used for mostly personal publications, and for some experiments that require a more robust host.

This, too, is FABbnet: Another set of pages about a not so secret location.

And This, too, is FABbnet: A 'newsy-er' version about the not-so-secret location.

An old ISP home page: There's nothing on this page except links to my other pages. It's interesting that it still works long after I dumped this particular ISP. Maintenance?
My current ISP's no longer support free web space for home pages. Gee, what a loss, eh?

And finally...

Dorothy's Page

What can I say...

contact:

You can reach me via e-mail as rgm at fabbnet.net.