DPAccess: DPbox Common Gateway Interface

Paolo Subiaco http://gw.ir3ip.ampr.org/iw3grx


Contents

Introduction

DPbox is a powerful amateur radio BBS program, written by DL8HBS and DL4YBG running in some unices platforms such as Linux.

The Main characteristic of DPbox is the communication with other programs using a socket: this is a great idea because it permits an easy way to access DPbox from external applications.

Since version 5.00, DL8HBS provided an external program, DPGATE, usable to access DPbox features from telnet connections or CGI scripts.

In the optics of access ham BBS features through a web browser, the DPAccess project was born: it is a small suite of programs and scripts which permits users to access DPBbox bbs functions from a CGI interface.

Programs are written in C language, scripts are written in Tcl.

Main features

ToDo

Developers

I'm very glad if someone would improve new features to this project, and redistribute it with all sources as I've done.

Probably many developers prefer other scripting language than Tcl: the first version of DPAccess scripts was written in Perl, resulting in a large amount of resources needed with a very long execution time, either using Apache/mod_perl. Then i tried with Tcl, and now execution time is satisfied: Tcl is fast and has a very clear sintax similar to C and Bourne Shell.

To permit informations to be exchanged by people who are interested about this project, a forum is created at URL http://gw.ir3ip.ampr.org/eforum.

Available versions

DPAccess-0.2 - 8th August 2000

This was the first published version.

[15k] dpaccess-0.2.tar.gz

DPAccess-1.0 - 8th June 2001

More complete version, with multilanguage support and stylesheet selection.

Not very easy to install, but i hope that someone help me to make DPAccess installation less traumatic!

[94kb] dpaccess-1.0.tar.gz

DPAccess-1.1 - development

Introduced Full Text Retrieval using DPbox crawler.

Installation

The scripts called by the web server are made in Tcl language: in this way they are easely adjustable and testable, and also they are very fast. Infact, Tcl is one of the faster scripting language, much more than Perl either enabling apache/mod_perl.

The scripts, which must be put into the cgi-bin directory of the web server, are:

Other text files, contained in a directory reachable by the web server such as /home/www/html/dpbox, are used in support to dp.tcl main script:

Few C programs are provided, and they will be put in the /usr/local/*bin directories:

and finally, some utilities like:

From a shell, you must type make to compile the C programs, then type su - to obtain a root shell, finally make install to install all needed files in the appropriate directories.

Note: there are some definitions which you must changed in the top of Makefile, dp.tcl, dpaccess_pass.c and dpprivlinks.c.

Specific documentations

dpaccess_pass.c

This is a C program which provid user authentication using one-way encrypting alghoritm. The program will take user information from a file in a directory readable from nobody and writable from dpbox administrator. Dpaccess cgi script will call this program with this syntax dpaccess_pass command arg1 [arg2 [arg3]]

Conclusions

Installing this software is not easy: you must probably change some parameters in Makefile, dp.tcl and dpaccess_pass.c, so be patient!

For any request, post a short message on the dpbox forum at http://gw.ir3ip.ampr.org/eforum.

Any opinion, suggestion about this project is welcome. Any modifications to the scripts are welcome too.

Finally, i want apologize for my bad english.

About this document ...

DPAccess: DPbox Common Gateway Interface

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 99.2beta8 (1.42)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 0 -nonavigation dpaccess.tex

The translation was initiated by Paolo Subiaco on 2001-06-10


Paolo Subiaco 2001-06-10