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Roaming Access Server for OS/2 (English version)

Russian version

The new version of Netscape Communicator 4.61 is to be released soon. One of its most interesting innovations is a roaming user support, the possibility to store all the user setup data along with bookmarks and other customized settings on a dedicated server, to allow any user who has access to this server to retain his environment when using a browser from different locations. (We already presented a screenshot of roaming user setup dialog from early Communicator beta).

Any LDAP or HTTP server could be used as a roaming access server. The HTTP server should support GET, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, and MOVE requests. You can find more information about that on Netscape website:


Roaming Access Server Setup

The easiest way is to use the Apache web server with mod_roaming module by Vincent Partington. OS/2 binaries compiled by George Nechaeff are available from our site. To make sure that your copy of Apache contains mod_roaming launch it with "-l" command line switch: 

  F:\os2httpd>httpd.exe -l

  Compiled-in modules:

    http_core.c

    mod_charset.c

    ...

    mod_roaming.c

    mod_php3.c

    mod_jserv.c
The next step is to configure the software (let's assume you already have the Apache itself set up properly). Add the following lines to the httpd.conf file: 

  <IfModule mod_roaming.c>

    RoamingAlias /roaming /os2httpd/roaming

    <Location /roaming>

      AuthType Basic

      AuthName "Roaming User"

      AuthUserFile /os2httpd/conf/.users

      require valid-user

    </Location>

  </IfModule>
/roaming - an alias for your web server to be used by roaming users to access their browser configurations.
/os2httpd/roaming - the real directory on your hard drive to store the roaming user data.
/os2httpd/conf/.users - a file with user login and password information.

All you have to do now is to add your users in /os2httpd/conf/.users file using the htpasswd utility. The following sample command will add user "eu": 


  htpasswd /os2httpd/conf/.users eu
Then restart the web server and your roaming access server is ready to serve. Note that you don't have to restart it each time you add a new user, this is only needed after changing your server configuration.

Netscape Comminicator 4.51 Setup

I will not talk too much about that. Just take a look at the following screenshots (I've used Windows version of Communicator to take these screenshots). There's a "Roaming User" section in the Preferences dialog. You need to turn on the Roaming Access and enter your username which is used to check your server access privileges:

The next page lets you to set up the server information. Select "HTTP server", and enter the base URL for your user data directory. In our case it is http://w8/roaming/eu/ (http://w8 is my local httpd server, the /roaming directory is the alias you set before in the server config file, and eu is the user name):

The third page allows to select which configuration files are to download from the server:

Now restart your Netscape Communicator and enter your password (we're now using a FreeBSD version of Netscape Communicator 4.51 just to show that the technology is available for almost any platform):

And finally, watch the configuration download process:

That's all. Our configuration is tested successfully with FreeBSD and Windows clients (not only OS/2). I want to thank George Nechaeff for Apache binaries and help with server setup. If you have any questions or any information to add to this page -- send me a message, I would be glad to receive your comments.

Thanks to Dmitry I. Platonoff for English translation.

Eugen Kuleshov, euxx.uland.com.

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