Bob, there's only one thing that would make this sweeter; that would be
if Ron installed the web software on his 50-100GigaFlop cluster, let it
serve the menu, we make our choices, it compiles the kernel and bios
software appropriately, and emails back a 2Mbit image (base64, thanks
Ron) 3.8seconds later ;-))
----- Original Message -----
>From: "Bob Drzyzgula" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "Linuxbios" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: More on configuration
>Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 22:35:17 -0400
>
> I've tinkered some more with my latter idea -- to make the
> configuration a web-based application -- and have made some
> basic progress.
>
> Clearly one of the biggest hassles with this method would
> be having to muck with the local system's web server,
> especially if one normally serves pages out from the
> machine one is using to build the flash image. But it
> occured to me that, for this application, there was no
> particular need or advantage to using the main web server
> for the machine. What seemed to make more sense, once
> I thought about it, was to use one of the tiny, drop-dead
> simple web servers that are available, and bring that up
> on a non-standard port; I used port 8083 in my tests.
> By running it on a port above 1024 you don't need root
> access to your machine to install the web server.
>
> I quickly looked through freshmeat and decided to try
> boa, http://www.boa.org/. Boa is GPL'd, and the source
> code and documentation amounts to a whopping 107K. On my
> 333MHz AMD K6, it took maybe a minute or two to configure
> and build. There's only one executable really needed,
> although they do provide a second one that will generate
> html directory listings. Boa supports CGI and I was able to
> get it running a python script with no trouble.
>
> Really, it would be very straightforward to include a
> customized boa configuration file, start/stop script and
> set of html and cgi files in the Linuxbios distribution;
> the executable is simple and flexible enough that the
> stock, default build of the boa sources should be entirely
> sufficient, and since it's GPL'd and tiny the boa sources
> could just be included in the distribuiton.
>
> With a few minutes hacking about, I put together a simple
> CGI script that provides a list of mainboards for which
> source directories are provided in the distribution. This
> script is designed to run from [srcroot]/freebios/util/webconfig/cgi-bin/
>
> import os
> print "Content-type: text/htmlnnn"
> print "<HTML>"
> print "<BODY>"
> print "<H1><center>Please select a mainboard</center></H1>"
> os.chdir("../../../src/mainboard/")
> mfrlist = os.listdir(".")
> print "<ul>"
> for mfr in mfrlist:
> if mfr == "CVS":
> continue
> print "t<li>%s</li>" % mfr
> os.chdir("./%s" % mfr);
> mblist = os.listdir(".")
> print "tt<ul>"
> for mb in mblist:
> if mb == "CVS":
> continue
> print "ttt<li><a href="/cgi-bin/process-mb.cgi?%s,%s">%s</a></li>"
% (mfr,mb,mb)
> print "tt</ul>"
> os.chdir("..")
> print "</ul>"
> print "</BODY>"
> print "</HTML>"
>
> There's no "process-mb.cgi" script yet.
>
> Clearly this is just a beginning but I thought y'all might
> like to have a chance to comment on the direction I'm going
> with this.
>
> --Bob
>
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