This section provides specific reference information about the requirements and operation of the HomeDoor extension, which performs the actual home page serving. See the next section for details about HomeDoor Admin, which is used to configure the HomeDoor extension.
Where to run HomeDoor: HomeDoor can run on any Mac which is connected to an Ethernet-based IP network. It does not have to run on the same network as the Web servers its URLs point to. The range of addresses configured into HomeDoor must be valid for the network on which HomeDoor is running.
HomeDoor can run on a Mac which is concurrently providing or accessing IP-based services via MacTCP or Open Transport's TCP/IP. Specifically, you can run HomeDoor on the Mac that is running your Web server.
If you do run HomeDoor on a Macintosh which is also running MacTCP or Open Transport's TCP/IP, you must be sure that HomeDoor is not configured with a URL for the IP address assigned to that Macintosh. Otherwise TCP/IP services may not function, since HomeDoor will take over that address. If you run HomeDoor standalone, it does not require either MacTCP or Open Transport.
Multiple Ethernet ports: If HomeDoor is running on a Macintosh with multiple Ethernet ports (for instance the built-in Ethernet and an Ethernet card), it will be active on the first Ethernet port it finds. The order HomeDoor searches in is the built-in Ethernet first, followed by cards in slots in numerical order of the slots themselves (refer to your Macintosh's user guide for the specific numerical order of your Mac's slots). The Ethernet port used by HomeDoor will not necessarily be the same as the port used by the Mac's AppleTalk or TCP/IP implementation.
The HomeDoor log: The HomeDoor log keeps a record of direct accesses to pages within the domains which HomeDoor supports. The log also records other significant events, such as the starting and stopping of HomeDoor itself or any errors which may occur.
HomeDoor's log only lists accesses to pages which are made directly through HomeDoor. Such accesses are made using absolute URLs of the form http://www.companyX.com or http://www.companyX.com/file-or-directory. Generally these accesses will be to the home page of a particular site or sub-site and not to subsequent pages of that site. As explained below in the section "How HomeDoor works" , accesses to subsequent pages (made through relative URLs) go directly to the site, not through HomeDoor. Since the HomeDoor log generally only lists initial site accesses, it provides a good general overview of top-level access to the sites that HomeDoor is supporting. If you desire complete log files on a site-by-site basis, check out the LogDoor multi-site log processor.
The HomeDoor log is stored as a text file in the Preferences folder of the System folder, and is always named "HomeDoor.log". It can be read with any application that can read text files. Double-clicking on the log will result in it being opened by SimpleText. SimpleText, however, can only read files up to 32K big, so you may wish to read the log using another type of application, such as a word processor. Some word processors can not read files which are in use by another application, so you may need to disable HomeDoor logging before reading the log file. See the Admin Reference section for details of disabling logging.
If you want HomeDoor to begin a new log, simply disable logging, move or rename the HomeDoor.log file and re-enable logging. HomeDoor will create a new log file and begin logging to it.
For details of HomeDoor's log format, consult Appendix 2.
How HomeDoor works: HomeDoor takes advantage of a feature in HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol -- the protocol used on the Web) known as redirection. A browser wishing to look at a Web page issues an HTTP GET command to the address indicated by the URL (this address is usually obtained from the domain name system, based on the first part of the URL). If the address is being managed by HomeDoor, HomeDoor receives the request and returns an HTTP REDIRECT in response. The REDIRECT contains the actual URL of the associated default home page, as entered in HomeDoor Admin. The browser receives the REDIRECT and then requests that page directly from the actual server, using the full URL. From then on, the browser talks directly to the Web server if other (relative) links on that server are accessed.
To be precise, HomeDoor actually does more than simply returning, in the REDIRECT, the URL that has been configured for the address requested. Technically speaking, HomeDoor actually replaces the part of the URL which specifies the Web server itself (that is, the http://www.companyX.com part) with the URL to be returned. So a URL of the form http://www.companyX.com/ is returned as http://www.yourwebserver.com/companyX/, but a URL of the form http://www.companyX.com/file-or-directory becomes http://www.yourwebserver.com/companyX/file-or-directory. Since the "file-or-directory" part can in fact be arbitrarily long, a full virtual domain can be served by HomeDoor.
HomeDoor also implements an ICMP echo responder for each address it supports, making it possible to "ping" any of those addresses.
Browsers' display of HomeDoor URLs: Most Web browsers have an area where they display the "location" of the current page. Many browsers will display the actual URL in this area (that is, the URL to which the browser has been redirected, not the original URL). If it is desired that the actual URL not be displayed, you can have your network administrator set up a DNS alias to the actual Web server and use HomeDoor to redirect to that alias. For instance, instead of redirecting http://www.companyX.com to http://www.yourwebserver.com/companyX/, you could redirect it to http://www2.companyX.com/companyX/, where www2.companyX.com is a DNS alias to www.yourwebserver.com. A complete example of how to set up HomeDoor and your DNS for this type of display is available in Appendix 1.
Backing up HomeDoor: To back up HomeDoor's configuration, simply back up the HomeDoor extension file. If you ever need to restore that configuration, just drag the backed-up HomeDoor extension into the system folder and restart.
HomeDoor limitations:
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