[Techtalk] Using a web browser to control stuff locally -eek!

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 10:07:33AM -0700, Akkana Peck wrote:
> Patricia Fraser writes:
> > > > (b) On the server machine, the one which has the music files, set
> > > > up an Apache server.
> > >
> > > Does she really need to do that? Won't it work so long as the
> > > user/player has permission to access the files?
> > 
> > Kathryn's right, dangitall! Yes, you'll have to run Apache on the 
> > server.
> 
> Can someone say why? Certainly apache is needed to use cgi scripts
> or php, but I'm not clear why it would be needed if Esme was just
> running from html files using a browser that had a handler set up
> to call her music player of choice (which might be a script she
> wrote which then calls some other music player).

The reason was that if she wants to serve the music to *other* computers
on a network, they have to access the files from a different machine
than that which the files are actually on.  I can think of two ways of
enabling this; one is to have a web-server which will serve up the
files.  Another way is to set up NFS, and have the other machines
nfs-mount the directory on which the files live.  That would have
hassles of its own, and possibly be a bit less transparent to the newbie
users who are intended to use the setup.
 
> If she *does* set up apache, then cgi files might be the weapon of
> choice after all. The only argument I was aware of against cgi was
> that implementing them was more complicated because they require a
> web server.
Actually, that wasn't the only argument against CGI; one also has to
deal with either permissions problems (if the CGI is being run as the
web-server user) or the wonderful world of suexec (to make CGI run as
a normal user) which most of the time is fine, but when it doesn't work,
one tends to scratch one's head a lot...

And a simple web-page with links to the music files would work perfectly
well, so long as the browser is set up to be able to play music files.

CGI could be useful in the future for generating a HTML page with all
the links in it, without having to add them by hand when a new bunch of
files are added.

Esme can escalate the fanciness of her setup step-by-step, which is a
good way of doing it.

Kathryn Andersen
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