<P>The choices windows are available by choosing the 'Choices...' entry from the icon bar menu. The editing of choices is actually handled by a separate program which is launched when you click on the 'Choices...' entry. Once activated it will open up a window :</P>
<P>Each configuration section is available by clicking on the respective icon. Each of the sections is documented below. Also, interactive help is fully supported.</P>
<P>Note that the choices do not immediately update the server (it could be hazardous to let this happen). To use your updated configuration, you must choose the <I>Save</I> menu entry and then quit and re-load Netplex.</P>
<P>Below, where items are shown in square brackets, they are the default values for that item.</P>
<P>This section controls where Netplex will look for web pages and which file will be looked for when the client requests a directory-only URL.</P>
<DL>
<DT><B>Pathname</B>
<DD>This field specifies the directory that Netplex will look in to find your web pages. Drag a directory, or image file such as a DOSFS partition, onto the <I>Pathname</I> writable to set it as the served page directory.
<DT><B>Look for [index] by default</B>
<DD>This tells Netplex the name of the file to look for by default when told to retrieve a directory. For example, if the URL requested is http://www.netplex.co.uk/ then http://www.netplex.co.uk/index will be returned to the client, if present.
<DD>Dropping a file on the <I>Look for</I> writable will set it to the name of the file.
</DL>
<H3>Server report page</H3>
<P>This section lets you configure the format of server reports - the information screens returned to clients when the server encounters an unexpected condition.</P>
<DL>
<DT><B>Template</B>
<DD>In these fields you enter HTML-marked up text which makes up the server report page. Where you want the report-specific parts of the text to go, you insert a special marker contained in brackets into the text. '(code)' inserts the HTTP report code, '(title)' inserts the HTTP report name and '(message)' inserts a message detailing the reason for the server report.
<DD>Try to avoid large server report pages, graphical content should also be kept to a minimum.
<P>This section lets you control to what level of HTTP compliance Netplex works.</P>
<DL>
<DT><B>Allow HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive Connections</B>
<DD>When set, this enables support for the 'Keep-Alive' HTTP extension, as defined by the HTTP/1.1 draft. This allows clients that support it (including <I>ArcWeb</I>, <I>Netscape</I> and <I>MSIE</I>) to use 'persistent' connections. These are long-lived connections which allow multiple requests to be dealt with over a single client-server connection. Instead of opening up separate connections to the server for each resource, a single connection is opened and the client and server exchange requests and responses using the same connection. This eliminates the overhead of establishing many separate connections to a server.
<DD>There are some potential problems with Keep-Alive persistent connections, so I have decided to leave whether it is enabled as an choice for the server administrator. One of the problems is that some user-agents will fail to terminate open connections, leaving them active until they time out. So if you're using Netplex with only one connection then this will block the use of the server until the connection times out.
<DT><B>HTTP/1.1</B>
<DD>When set, this enables support for the HTTP/1.1 protocol. At the moment this only provides a similar function to the Keep-Alive option. However, <I>all</I> HTTP/1.1 clients are aware of persistent connections - not just those that choose to support it, as with Keep-Alive.
</DL>
<H3>Allowed methods</H3>
<P>This section allows you to specify what <I>methods</I> clients can use with the server.</P>
<P>When any one of these options is unset and a client communicates with the server using it, a <I>Not Implemented</I> report will be generated.</P>
<DL>
<DT><B>GET & HEAD</B>
<DD>When set, this enables responses to GET and HEAD requests, which serve documents and the document headers only respectively.
<DT><B>POST</B>
<DD>When set, this enables clients to submit data to CGI programs, for example a form processor.
<DT><B>PUT</B>
<DD>When set, this allows uploads of files to the server. This should be left off for general use, as anyone people can purposely overwrite any write-enabled file within the server's domain.
<DT><B>DELETE</B>
<DD>When set, this allows clients to delete files from the server. Again, this should be left off for general use.
</DL>
<H3>Miscellaneous</H3>
<P>This section affects operations of the server which can't really be included anywhere else.</P>
<DL>
<DT><B>Connections timeout after [10] minutes</B>
<DD>Using this option, you can specify for how long Netplex will let a connection remain idle for before automatically removing it. Remember that some connections will be very slow indeed and so you should not set the timeout too low.
<DD>Note that this is also the timeout value used for persistent connections.
<DT><B>Pop-up errors</B>
<DD>This toggles whether errors will open up a pop-up dialogue box. Very occasionally Netplex may suffer an <I>untrapped</I> error. This can result in the pop-up box popping up and getting in the way of whatever else you happen to be doing. Turning this option off will cause errors to not be reported in a pop-up box - they will still be recorded in the log file though. Netplex is intelligent enough to know when a severe error has occurred and will shut itself down in such circumstances.
<DT><B>Resolve client addresses</B>
<DD>In previous versions of Netplex, it would automatically resolve the IP addresses of clients into host names. This proved to be a very time-consuming activity and could sometimes lead to requests taking several seconds longer than they needed to. For this reason, you can now turn off the automatic resolution of client addresses. This will mean that requests will be faster, but in the status display and log file, client's addresses will be represented numerically.
<P>This section allows you to configure how much of your Internet bandwidth and processing time you are willing to let Netplex use. The default values were chosen to be suitable for a typical modem user. See the <A HREF="a0-perfo">Performance Issues</A> page for more information.</P>
<DL>
<DT><B>Use the [www] port</B>
<DD>The default for this option is <I>www</I> (port 80) which is the standard port for HTTP servers. By changing the port Netplex operates on you can have more than one HTTP server running on your machine. However, anyone attempting to access your server on a port other than 80 must specify the port to connect to in the URL, for example: http://www.netplex.co.uk:81/ would connect to port 81.
<DD><B>Note :</B> <I>Running multiple copies of Netplex is not possible in this release</I>.
<DT><B>Wait for [50]cs between processing</B>
<DD>Netplex must limit the amount of processor time it uses in order to allow multitasking to function correctly. This value controls how long Netplex will wait before it continues processing. The value is specified in centiseconds so 100cs is one second, 50cs is half a second, and so on.
<DD>Every [50]cs Netplex will check for and accept connections, parse requests and despatch portions of files through the connection(s) it has to its clients. The higher you set the value, the longer Netplex will have to wait before it can process again. The lower you set the value the faster Netplex can respond to requests.
<DT><B>Allow up to [1] simultaneous connections</B>
<DD>This option allows you to limit the number of simultaneous connections Netplex will handle. If all connections are in use and another client tries to connect, then Netplex will ignore it until it is free to process its request. When fetching multiple-file pages (i.e. one with graphics), most browsers will attempt multiple connections.
<DT><B>Allocate a [1.5] Kb buffer for each connection</B>
<DD>Netplex needs a temporary buffer in which to store chunks of files before sending them. This field sets the size of this buffer. The higher you set this value, the more data will be sent each time Netplex processes a connection.
