Chameleon Personal Web Server for Windows 3.1
Getting Started With Your Own Web Server
Welcome to the NetManage sample Web.
This has been designed to help you get started with setting
up your own World Wide Web server. The Web server
can serve HTML and other documents, images, sound files
and even movies to Web clients like Chameleon Mosaic+.
To achieve this, you need to first create your own Web.
The following sections will lead you through the sample Web
to clarify the details involved in setting up your Web server.
We have even created three sample home pages showing how
you can make a home page for a small business or your family.
The NetManage Personal Web Server has two features
normally found in high end servers forms support
and image map support. Check these two pages for
examples of how to use these features.
What is a Web?
A Web is a collection of
HTML documents and other files that you want to serve to
Web clients. This collection of documents and files
resides in your Windows filesystem. The starting point of
this collection is referred to as the Document Root Directory
in the Chameleon Personal Web Server.
You can have subdirectories under the Document Root Directory
and you can place the files that you want to serve in both the Document Root
Directory and in these subdirectories.
The important point is that your Web is made up of the Document Root
Directory and the subdirectories therein and only these are visible
to Web clients. The other parts of the filesystem that are outside
the Web are invisible to the Web clients. This is a security feature
provided by the Web server.
Sample Web
NetManage has created a sample Web that you can peruse to get
started with setting up your own Web server.
The files in this sample Web
are located in the Document Root Directory specified in the
Personal Web Server Configuration dialog box when you bring up the server
for the very first time. You can look at these files to see how exactly
they are composed. This will give you ideas for creating your own Web files
and for setting up your own Web.
Click here
to see a primer on composing HTML documents.
Here's an embedded image
that you must be
really familiar with.
Here's the same embedded image again,
but this time you can click on it and make it do something. Try clicking on it.
Personal Web Server Features
The Personal Web Server has two features that are handy in dealing with
directories. Typically, users request a file when they specify
a URL to a Web client, for e.g., http://machine@company.com/homepage.htm.
In this case, the Web server will serve the file to the Web client
if the file exists.
Now consider the case where the user specifies a directory to the Web client,
for e.g.,
http://machine@company.com/directory.
The Personal Web Server handles this case in one of two ways:
Setting Up Your Own Web
Perusing the files that make up the sample Web can help you
understand how to set up your own Web documents and other files.
Once you have composed
your Web files, you are ready to reconfigure the Web server to make it serve
files from your Web rather than the sample Web.
All you need to do is to
specify the Document Root Directory in the Personal Web Server Configuration
dialog box. This dialog box can be activated from the Configure...
menu option in the Settings menu. Recall that the Document Root
Directory is the directory
where your Web starts. Specify this and click OK
in the dialog box.
The Web server is now ready to
serve your documents and files from your very own Web. (Note: You can change the
other parameters in the dialog box if you want to, but this is not necessary.)