Xitami for OS/2

The OS/2 version of Xitami was built using GCC 2.7.2.1 and runs with the EMX 0.9c environment. The EMX DLLs will be required, and are available from fine FTP sites everywhere (e.g. ftp.leo.org, ftp.cdrom.com, hobbes.nmsu.edu). Compiled with assertions and gdb debugging information disabled. The OS/2 version of Xitami was built by Ewen McNeill who also ported SFL and SMT to OS/2.

The current distribution of Xitami for OS/2 was built for EMX 0.9c fix 2, and will work with releases up to EMX 0.9c fix 4.

Download the OS/2 binary package -- you'll need an unzip tool to extract the archive. You can also build the server from the Windows source package, using the supplied xibuild.cmd file.

To install an Desktop icon for Xitami, run install.cmd.

When you have installed Xitami, run xitami.exe, then connect with any web browser. You should see the "Welcome To Xitami" test page. If Xitami cannot run on its normal port (80), it shows an error message: this can happen if another server is using port 80. To use an alternative HTTP port, use the '-b' option. This shifts the standard HTTP and FTP ports by some 'base'. For example, '-b 5000' runs the Xitami HTTP service on port 5080 and the FTP service on port 5021. You would then connect using http://localhost:5080/.

To halt Xitami, press Ctrl-C. This shuts-down the server cleanly.

Using TCP/IP With OS/2

• OS/2 Warp Connect and OS/2 Warp 4 (Merlin) are set-up for network-based (LAN) TCP/IP automatically. In those cases it is just a matter of enabling the loop-back connection, which can be done in the TCP/IP configuration page, and then the address http://127.0.0.1/ can be used to access pages on the same system.
• With OS/2 Warp 3 (i.e. not the connect version) only serial-based TCP/IP is supplied but the loop-back connection can be enabled using the ifconfig command:

  ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 up
  
  

• With OS/2 2.x there is no TCP/IP software supplied by default. However, there is an extra package available from IBM (even today, we think), which adds TCP/IP networking. OS/2 1.x (16 bit code) doesn't support TCP/IP at all as far as we know.

In all cases where TCP/IP is bundled with OS/2, it is an installation option. Obviously the TCP/IP software must be installed to use TCP/IP-based programs like Xitami.

As far as we know, OS/2 can be used without a nameserver available (we use a Linux machine as the nameserver for our network), if a 'hosts' file is set up in the %ETC% directory (i.e. the directory pointed at by the ETC environment variable. This directory is typically d:\tcpip\etc, or d:\mptn\etc, where d: is the boot drive). The 'hosts' file should contain the normal host information, i.e. the IP address, and then the name associated with that IP address, on the same line separated by (one or more) spaces. OS/2 can be told to use the hosts file before checking DNS by setting the environment variable; set this line in config.sys and reboot:

USE_HOSTS_FIRST=1

Configuring The EMX System

The default number of file handles for an EMX is around 20-40. This is too little for a heavily-used server, and you may get errors logged as "out of file handles".

The number of file handles available in programs that use EMX can be controlled via a runtime settable environment variable, EMXOPT.

From the EMX runtime documentation (emxrt.doc):

7 emx options

=============



You can customize emx by setting the EMXOPT environment variable. This

environment variable contains a list of options, similar to command line

options. The options must be separated by at least one blank.  Example:



    set emxopt=-c -h40



7.1 emx options (OS/2)

----------------------



-c      Disable core dumps caused by signals and exceptions



-h#     Set OS/2 file handle limit to #.  The number # must be between

        10 and 65536

[...]

For a busy web server, a good value would be 120:

set EMXOPT=-h120

Source Installation For OS/2

With the EMX development system (including the GNU C compiler) you can rebuild Xitami on your OS/2 system. You must have installed EMX (we recommend version 0.9c) including these packages: emxrt.zip, bsddev.zip, gnudev1.zip, gnudev2.zip, emxdev1.zip, emxdev2.zip.

To rebuild Xitami, first unzip the source package in a suitable directory, e.g. C:\Xitami. This creates a source tree and also installs the various files and subdirectories that are needed for running Xitami. The sources are in src\sfl and src\smt. You can build the executable using the command file 'xibuild'. If this fails, for some reason, you must build SFL and SMT manually, but this is fairly simple:

1. Open an OS/2 command window and cd to src\sfl, and type the command 'build'. If all goes well, this will compile the SFL library, and link a number of test programs. The two files that you really need are libsfl.a (or libsfl.lib, depending on how EMX is configured) and sfl.h.
2. Copy these two files into src\smt. Now type 'build' in that directory too. This creates a number of files, but the two you really need are xitami.exe and xixlat.exe.
3. Copy these two files into .... (the main Xitami directory). You can now type 'xitami' to start the web server.