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Sambar Server Documentation
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| Frequently Asked Questions |
Java applets are served up just like images or HTML files. You do not need to do anything special. If your applets aren't working, make sure that you are pointing to the applet properly in your APPLET tag. Java servlets are supported as well, see the JavaEngine documentation for details.
If run as an NT Service you must make sure to give the Sambar Server service a user with which to LOGON during startup and that user must belong to the ADMINISTRATORS group in order to access mapped drives.
WAP sites are generally regular HTTP servers. The end-user's WAP-enabled device contacts a gateway which then makes an HTTP request, compiles the data and sends the compacted version back to the device. The HTTP server need only support the basic WAP mime types:
application/vnd.wap.wmlc wmlc
application/vnd.wap.wmlsc wmlsc
image/vnd.wap.wbmp wbmp
text/vnd.wap.wml wml
text/vnd.wap.wmls wmls
If Automatic Directory listings are enabled, then before listing the contents of the directory, the server first looks for a README file to display above the directory listing. You can go to any directory where you do not have an index.htm file and create a file called README. Then visit the directory with your browser and the contents of the README file should be listed before the directory listing.
IE requires the Expires header for setting the expiration of dynamic content. The following Expires header demonstrates an example HTML page that forces the expiration of content:
<HTML><HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD><BODY>
</BODY></HTML>
Yes. The Sambar Server NT Service can be found at bin/ntserver.exe. The instructions for installation and execution of the Sambar Server NT Service can be found in the Installation Documentation. In addition, an NT Service monitor can be found at bin/ntview.exe; the NT Monitor connects to the NT Service and displays log activity. The source code for the Sambar Server NT Service and NT Monitor can be found in the samples/source directory.
Yes. In the config.ini file there is an entry in the [common] section which can be used to force the server to bind to a specific IP address at startup. The parameter, Force IP Bind should be set to the single IP address you wish the server to be bound to.
User logins are automatically timed out after the system defined Timeout Duration; the login timeout duration defaults to 30 minutes. To modify the user session timeout, modify the Timeout Duration in the [events] section of the config.ini file.
The realm name is defined in the Security Realm configuration variable defined in the config/config.ini file.
MIME entries are located in the config/mime.ini configuration file.
The configuration parameter Don't Log Requests in the config/config.ini can be set to /sysadmin* for to eliminate all requests for pages starting with /sysadmin. You can also restrict by IP address using the Don't Log IPs.
The configuration file config/iconmap.ini contains the icon mappings for displaying files when a directory listing is performed by the server.
Yes. All error messages can be found in the messages directory where the Sambar Server is installed. Any modifications made to these error files will reflected in subsequent Server error responses. In addition, to use the Sambar scripting within the error messages, rename the error file you wish to use scripting within so that the file ends with the .stm extension rather than .htm. For example the file messages/notfnd.htm can be renamed messages/notfnd.stm; after making this change, you can add tags such as <RCEdocument_uri> and <RCEreferer> to indicate the specific document that was not found along with the referring page.
The "Default Page" configuration variable (config.ini and vhost.ini) can be a space separated list of files to search for when no document is specified.
The FTP login message is returned from the FTP_WELCOME message defined in the config/macros.ini file. If there is no FTP_WELCOME define, then no welcome message is returned. The logout message is returned from the FTP_GOODBYE macro definition. You must restart the Sambar Server after modifying the config/macros.ini file in order for your changes to take effect.
Yes. NT Domain authentication or Radius authentication are available in addition to the internal server authentication mechanism. See the How To documentation for details on configuring these features. Further, I provide all of the source code for the username/password validation and directory location for HTTP as well as FTP (see samples/source/login.c -- http_connect() and ftp_connect()).
The Sambar Server comes with a non-caching HTTP proxy server and basic SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 proxy servers compiled in. These proxies perform modest security filtering via the sample application shipped with the server (see samples/source/security.c).
The proxies were designed to facilitate multiple clients on a private network connecting to the Internet on a single PPP (dialup) connection. This can be implemented by having a Windows 95/98 or NT machine connect to the Internet via modem while also listening to requests from their local network. Note that the gateway machine must be configured with two IP addresses -- one for the modem connection and one for the ethernet connection -- to support this operation.
The "Act As HTTP Proxy", "Act As SMTP Proxy", "Act As POP3 Proxy" and "Act As IMAP4 Proxy" parameters in the configuration file can be used to turn these features on. All proxy configuration can be performed via the system administration interface.
See the Proxy documentation for more details.
These programs rely on the SOCKS protocol to support operation behind a proxy. You will need to enable the SOCKS 5 proxy within the Sambar Pro Server and setup DNS on your local network to get these to work.
Important: The SOCKS5 proxy has a 300 second idle timeout, so ICQ must be configured accordingly.
The encryption performed in the server uses a "seed" found in the config.ini file: Public Key = Sambar Server Encryption Key. This key can be modified to ensure that encryption on the server is different on each server installation; modifying this key affects all passwd entries as well as RC@encrypt function calls. The one drawback to changing this key is that the sacrypt and htpasswd utilities have this seed hard-coded in them (Sambar Server Encryption Key). A future release will permit these utilities to be passed in an arbitrary seed.
The maximum length of any single entry line in a configuration file is 1024 bytes.
The Sambar Server has a default limit of 100KB for all content length (this applies to all GET/POST arguments as well as multipart/form-data). This limit can be increased or decreased by modifying the Maximum Content-Length parameter in the config.ini file.
Many users running Windows 95/98 or Windows NT experience an increasing thread-count in the Sambar Server display which will eventually cause the server to crash. This problem is most likely caused by bugs in the Microsoft Winsock driver that shipped with Windows 95/98 and NT. By applying the latest OS patches from Microsoft (especially winsock2), the server thread count should stay at between 4 and 10 during average use.
When using the MDAC 2.1 version of the Microsoft Access ODBC driver, an excessive amount of network packet and/or file activity occurs even when the ODBC connection is idle. The PageTimeout setting for the ODBC data source (DSN) can be increased to reduce the number of CPU cycles consumed on idle connections. Many thanks to Bert Hanks for tracking down this problem.
Patrick Maddox writes:
Typically when a laptop goes into suspend mode it shuts down or puts on standby all unnecessary services. Networking is considered one of these. The solution is to disable the suspend mode on the machine.
When your browser is configured to use the Sambar Server as a proxy server, you must also configure your browser to not use the proxy for local server accesses (e.g., localhost). If you fail to configure your browser in this manner, the Sambar Server proxy server will connect to your remote service each time the server is accessed.
The encryption performed in the server uses a "seed" found in the config.ini file: Public Key = Sambar Server Encryption Key. This key can be modified to ensure that encryption on the server is different on each server installation; modifying this key affects all passwd entries as well as RC@encrypt function calls. The one drawback to changing this key is that the sacrypt and htpasswd utilities have this seed hard-coded in them (Sambar Server Encryption Key). A future release will permit these utilities to be passed in an arbitrary seed.
The ghost icons are a problem with the system tray updates. The problem is that if the Sambar Server is not shutdown gracefully (or more often, when it shuts down the Watcher Daemon), the program does not unregister itself with the system tray. These ghost icons go away when you move your mouse over them.
Time is calculated from 1970 in seconds on most machines using the time() function. In 2038, the number of seconds that can be stored in an integer is reached and time() returns -1. The Sambar Server requires time() for many internal uses so it won't start if time() returns -1 on startup. Most folks (myself included) seem to figure that 64-bit machines will eliminate this problem long before 2038 so there hasn't been much effort to fix it.
The 499 status indicates that the user canceled the HTTP request before the entire document could be downloaded.
The robots.txt file is for web robots like those used by search engines. This file indicates what areas of the site may be searched and what areas should not be searched. See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html for more information.
Visitors to your site using IE 5.0 or higher who add your URL to their Favorites automatically request /favicon.ico from the server. Internet Explorer displays this icon file by your site's URL in the Favorites pulldown menu.
The /session directive is used to indicate that a Sambar Server RPC should be executed to fulfill the request. There is no /session directory. The parameter immediately following /session (i.e. /session/sendmail) corresponds to the RPC to be executed and parameters to pass to the RPC. The System Administrator console reports provide a list of all RPCs available for execution via the /session directive and the security restrictions imposed on each RPC. Many of the RPCs configured for execution are provided in source code in the samples subdirectory of the Sambar Server installation.
If you accessed the Sambar Server home page using the 'Open File...' or 'Open Local...' command of your browser then you are not invoking the Sambar Server and will not be able to access any Sambar Server features (such as administration).
Check the URL displayed at the top of your browser. If it is prefixed with file:// then this is the problem. Reconnect to the Sambar Server using the web server's address.
You can use filenames with a space in them by replacing the space in the URL with '%20' (without the quotes). For example: http://localhost/this%20file.htm
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