The HomeDoor default home page server is a unique product from Open Door Networks, Inc. Until HomeDoor, a Macintosh-based Web server could not provide multiple default home pages of the form http://www.companyX.com. Although you could assign multiple domain names to a Mac-based Web server, accessing that server through each of those domain names would always bring up the single default home page for the server itself. There was no way to indicate that, for instance, www.companyX.com should bring up company X's home page and www.companyY.com should bring up company Y's home page. Every Mac server could only have one default home page.
HomeDoor, in concert with your domain name server (DNS), enables a Mac-based Web server to provide a large number of default home pages (up to 256). HomeDoor requires no modification to the Web server itself, and does not even need to run on the same machine as the Web server (although it can). HomeDoor has been tested with the WebSTAR Web server from StarNine Technologies, but should work with any Web server whatsoever, even ones that don't run on Macintosh computers.
HomeDoor works by accepting requests from Web browsers for default home pages and redirecting those requests to particular directories or files on particular servers. The Web servers themselves are unaware of the presence of HomeDoor. For details of HomeDoor's operation, see the Extension Reference section.
HomeDoor not only serves default home pages, but also enables the creation of "virtual domains." The principal component of a virtual domain is a virtual Web server. A virtual Web server is a directory within an actual Web server that appears to the outside world as if it is a complete Web server in and of itself. A virtual Web server not only supports default home pages of the form http://www.companyX.com, but also files and directories within the virtual server of the form http://www.companyX.com/file-or-directory. HomeDoor enables any Web server to act as a virtual Web server.
An additional feature of HomeDoor is that it can log accesses to its default home pages and to pages within any virtual domain which it supports. The log, which only includes accesses made through HomeDoor, provides a concise listing of top-level accesses to default home pages and pages within HomeDoor's virtual domains.
Back to Table of Contents 
Forward to Getting Started