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The GN server

TheGN server is distributed as a gzip'ed tar file, which includes detailed documentation in HTML and plain text format in the doc subdirectory. GN does not read any configuration files when it starts up - all configuration information is supplied at compile time, although a few options can be specified on the command line (see Section ).

Two files, Makefile and config.h, contain the definitions of configuration values. The default values of some variables in these files are unsuitable for general use and must be altered to suit the site. The following makefile variables should be set up appropriately:

SERVERBINDIR

The directory into which the server program is to be installed.

BINDIR

The directory into which the auxiliary programs mkcache and uncache are to be installed.

LIBS

Standard system libraries that should be included in the program. There are suggested values commented out.

You may also want to set up the CC and CFLAGS makefile variables, as described in the introduction to this section. The configuration file, config.h, defines the following symbols which may require alteration:

GN_HOSTNAME

The name of the host system.

GN_LOGFILE

The pathname of the GN log file (can be overridden on the command line with the -L option).

ROOT_DIR

The pathname of the root directory of the data hierarchy (can be overridden as the command line argument).

MAINTAINER

Should contain "mailto:email-address", where email-address is the email address of the Web administrator.

ROOT_MENU_NAME

The title of the top-level Web document, which corresponds to the top-level gopher menu. The title of a menu is normally taken from its entry in the next higher-level menu. As there is no higher-level menu for the root menu, it must be specified here or on the command line with the -t option.

MIME_TYPE_FILE

The pathname of the MIME type file, used by mkcache to determine the type of files from their suffixes.

WAISGN

The complete pathname of the waisgn program, which is used to perform WAIS indexing.

FORBID_EXEC

If the definition of this variable is included, the execution of CGI scripts is prohibited.

Also in the config.h file is a line:

    #define SUN_OS4

The symbol SUN_OS4 should, if necessary, be replaced with one of the following symbols that best describes your operating system: AIX, AUX, BSD_386, CONVEX_0S, HPUX, IRIX, LINUX, NEXT, OSF1, PYRAMID, SCO, SEQUENT, SOLARIS2, SVR4, ULTRIX.

Having made alterations to the Makefile and config.h files, GN can be built by typing `make' in the top-level directory.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.