Tru64 Unix Tiny Web Server: nweb

Once I had Tru64 Unix 5.0 running on a FreeAXP AlphaServer 400, I went on a search for a very small but safe web server that would deliver one static html page to http clients.

My environment is Compaq C V6.1-011 on Digital UNIX V5.0 (Rev. 910) C compiler running on Tru64 Unix 5.0 (OSF1 V5.0 910 alpha).

The heavyweight Apache httpd was not in consideration - too much bloat for a single static page server.

I next attempted thttpd - tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server. I had to comment out "typedef long long int64_t;" in mmc.c, thttpd.c and libhttpd.c because the compiler complained of prior declaration in /usr/include/sys/bitypes.h, and could build successfully. But, on attempting to execute it, I get:

/usr/local/sbin/thttpd: getaddrinfo (null) - servname not supported for ai_socktype

Unfortunately my emails to the subscription address for the thttpd mailing list as well as directly to the mailing list did not produce any response. It is very quiet in the thttpd world.

Finally, I struck gold with Nigel Griffiths' nweb: a tiny, safe Web server (static pages only) - a masterpiece in 200 lines of posix-compatible classic Unix-style C code. The only tweaks I made to version 23 of the C program are:

• changed setpgrp() to setpgrp(0,0) for it to compile
• changed the logger() function to log to Tru64's syslog facility instead of an ever-growing nweb.log log file
• added a couple of mime types to the extensions array (ttf, css) for a downloadable font and CSS that my static page uses
• brought inclusion of <sys/types.h> before <unistd.h> as recommended by Tru64 Unix man page for the setpgrp function

A simple "cc -o nweb23 nweb23.c" produced a working nweb23 executable (with just one warning about a usual signed vs unsigned int used as a reference) which I moved to /usr/local/sbin. I added a /sbin/init.d/nweb23 script:

#!/sbin/sh

#

# start nweb23 httpd web server daemon

#

PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin

PORT=80

WEBROOT=/usr/users/decnet/webroot

#

export PATH PORT WEBROOT

#

case "$1" in

'start')

                        echo "Starting nweb23 httpd web server daemon"

                        /usr/local/sbin/nweb23 $PORT $WEBROOT

                        ;;

*)

                        echo "Usage:  $0 {start}"

                        ;;

esac

and created a link under /sbin/rc3.d to the init script, i.e. S99nweb23 -> ../init.d/nweb23, to start nweb up at boot.

That is all it took. nweb is happily serving http requests from the Tru64 server at http://sanyal.duckdns.org:89/.

A tarball containing the modified nweb version 23 source code along with the Tru64 Unix binary can be downloaded from my google drive.