Debian customization of WN



WN has tighter security than most www servers. By default, nothing will be served. You must enable access by creating an index file in the directory containing your html pages. This can be frustrating when first starting with WN. You really need to see the documentation.

Index

Debian modifications to upstream WN

I've increased the table size for MIME types to accomodate the Debian standard /etc/mime.types file.

Most of the programs that are distributed with WN have been renamed by prefixing the original name with wn. For example, the program indexmaker was renamed to wnindexmaker. The daemons wn and swn have been renamed to wnwnd and wnswnd. This was done to adhere to the Debian policy that no executable have a name less than 3 characters long, have more consistency in the package, and to prevent future name space conflicts.

I've added the following programs to the WN upstream source:

I've added man pages for all the programs in WN package. They've been designed to work well with the man2html program.

I've dropped the prototype digest authentication module. It uses the RSAREF code which could cause copyright problems.

Debian run-time configuration of WN

WN is configurable at both compile-time and run-time. To build this package, I made choices that might not suit your needs. Some of these choices can be overridden by using the proper set of options in the configuration files I provided in the WN configuration directory /etc/wn. The file /etc/wn/wn.rc is a wrapper script that reads in configuration information from the file /etc/wn/wn.conf. Both files are sh shell scripts. The /etc/wn/wn.rc should not require any modification. The configuration file includes the variables:

wn_www_root mandatory
The root of www data hierarchy. The Debian standard location is /var/www.
wn_daemon mandatory
Full path to program to execute. This will either the inetd based server wnwnd or the stand-alone server wnswnd. If you change this value, you must update your Debian inetd and rc.d configuration.
wn_log_format optional
Command line option that control the log format used by the server.
wn_log_format_debug optional
Command line option that controls if debugging information is written to log files.
wn_log_format_syslog optional
Command line option that controls if logging uses UNIX syslog.
wn_log_file_access [ " " | "<directory>" ] optional
Command line options that sets which file to use for logging normal access information. Ignored if syslog is defined to y. If the empty string "" is used as the value of this option then no access logging will be done. If not defined, uses the compiled in default.
wn_log_file_error [ " " | "<directory>" ] optional
Command line options that sets which file to use for logging error messages. If the empty string "" is used as the value then the WN access log file is used.
wn_user
Command line options that control access, authentication and execution of CGI programs.

Debian compile-time configuration of WN

Here are the choices I made to build the binary package and which server options or index file attributes to use to override.


Jean Pierre LeJacq <jplejacq@quoininc.com>
Mon, 4 May 1998 22:58:08 -0400