Chebucto Suite Workshop

Next Meeting April 24, 1996
Previous meeting April 10, 1996
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Index

• Public Access Terminal Systems (PATS)
• csinstall
• CGI Standards

Public Access Terminal Systems (PATS)

It was emphasized that all maintenance of the collection of PATS needs to be noted on the cable-pats mailing list, so that all concerned are updated. The ccn-tech mailing list automatically gets copies.

It was proposed that a common file, which could be down-loaded/updated from CCN to each PAT as needed, containing the configurations of all the PATS, along with a selector variable, would let us maintain the systems more easily than having separate files for each system.

New PAT design

Requirements:

• Cable modem
• Ethernet card
• 16 MB ram.

csinstall

CGI Standards

This is a continuation of our process of sanitizing the scripts to support Virtual Community Networks (VCN) and distribution.

Recommendations:

• Use $DOCUMENT_ROOT rather than the path "/ccn/info/". $DOCUMENT_ROOT is available from the Environment in a shell script, and is exported by httpd for lynx-cgi scripts.
• . $DOCUMENT_ROOT/.cgi-funclib will read in the function definitions needed.
• cs_html_head -t mail-address -h host Title where optional parameters -t provides comment address, -h provides host-name which defaults to $MAILHOST, and of course the rest provides the content for the HTML title. This routine also looks for a query string in the call, and converts any values found to shell variables.
• search-user?var=value&var2=val2 causes the creation of shell variables cgi_var and cgi_var2 with contents value and val2, respectively.
• For diagnostics, use:

            exec 2>$CS_LOG/test.#progname
            set -x
  

• To catch traps:

            trap 'cs_html_foot' 0  (and other signals if appropriate) or
            trap 'cs_html_foot office' 0 (to bring up the office button bar)
  

• To simplify the source-browser, surround variables tested in if or case with double quotes, e.g.:

            if [ "$x" = "it" ] then ...
  
            case "$VAR" in
                 "yes")
  

• Start variables with a lower case letter for local variables that should be ignored by the source-browser; others will be indexed.

Next Meeting April 24, 1996

Previous meeting April 10, 1996

This Page prepared by Ed Dyer

Workshop Coordinator David J. Murdoch