WWWOFFLE - World Wide Web Offline Explorer - Version 2.7 - Win32 ================================================================ ************************************************************************* ** This file is rather out of date because it was written for earlier ** ** versions of WWWOFFLE and cygwin. If you compile WWWOFFLE for Win32 ** ** and can suggest changes then please let me know. ** ************************************************************************* This is the Windows 32-bit version of the World Wide Web OFFline Explorer, otherwise know as WWWOFFLE. A UNIX version of this program has been available since the start of 1997. The possibility of a Windows version of the program was brought to my attention by an investigation of the Cygwin development kit. The Cygwin Development Kit -------------------------- The Cygwin development kit is described in its FAQ as follows: The Cygwin tools are Win32 ports of the popular GNU development tools for Windows NT, 95, and 98. They function through the use of the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API. Use the tools to: o Develop Win32 console or GUI applications, using the Win32 API. o Easily port many significant UNIX programs to Windows NT/9x without making significant source code changes. Configure and build most GNU software from source using standard Unix build procedures. o Work in a fairly complete UNIX-like environment, with access to many common UNIX utilities (from both the provided bash shell and the standard Win32 command shell). More information about the Cygnus development kit and the GNU tools that are in the development kit can be obtained from their web-sites. http://cygwin.com/ http://www.gnu.org/ To compile WWWOFFLE you should use the latest version of the cygwin library. Using WWWOFFLE -------------- Because this version of WWWOFFLE is a port of a UNIX program (with negligible changes from the UNIX version) some of the concepts and features may not be familiar to users of MS Windows. Filenames - - - - - On UNIX systems the '/' character is used as a path separator, DOS uses '\', you should use the UNIX format in the wwwoffle.conf configuration file and in the command line arguments. One other change that has been made is that on DOS the ':' character is not allowed in filenames so the '!' character has been used in the host sub-directory names instead. On UNIX systems the filenames are case-sensitive and can be longer than 8.3 characters. WWWOFFLE requires that the files that it creates keep their case and are longer than 8.3 characters. On UNIX systems there is no distinction between the separate disk drives like there is under DOS. With a DOS system there are drives 'A:', 'C:', 'D:' etc, on UNIX all of the disks are accessed from the root directory '/'. In the Cygnus CDK and hence in WWWOFFLE all pathnames are expected to be in this format, the drive that the operating system booted from (normally drive C:) is '/', drive 'A:' would be '//a/', drive 'D:' would be '//d/'. You must use this format in the wwwoffle.conf configuration file and in the command line arguments. The default installation location for WWWOFFLE on UNIX is different from that for Windows-32. UNIX Windows-32 Cached files: /var/spool/wwwoffle /wwwoffle Config file: /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf /wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf Executables: /usr/local/bin & /usr/local/sbin /wwwoffle/bin Documentation: /usr/local/man/man* /wwwoffle/doc In the documentation and the program you may find references to these pathnames and filenames, you should make the appropriate conversions. Other Terms - - - - - - Syslog - The system logfile, many daemon processes (servers) write their status to this file. Daemon - A program (usually some type of server) that runs in the background and sleeps until it is called upon to do anything. Username/uid - Users on a UNIX system have to log on and are assigned a username and a numberic user ID (uid). [Not the same as a Windows 95/98 logon username] Groupname/gid - Users on UNIX are also assigned to a group that has a name and a numeric Group ID (gid). [Not applicable to Windows 95/98] Running WWWOFFLE ---------------- The WWWOFFLE server program 'wwwoffled' is typically it is started from the boot time scripts (the equivalent to autoexec.bat on DOS). On a Win32 system I do not know the best way of starting a program at boot time so I leave it to you to decide. The WWWOFFLE helper program 'wwwoffle' is run each time that the dial-up connection is started or stopped. This is normally done by the scripts that are automatically run by the PPP connection process. Again I do not know the best way of doing this on Win32, the graphical interface to DUN does not appear to allow for this. Quick Demonstration - - - - - - - - - - To see what WWWOFFLE does, use the following steps for a quick demonstration. 1) Edit the configuration file c:\wwwoffle\wwwoffle.conf 2) Start the WWWOFFLE demon running. c:\wwwoffle\bin\wwwoffled 3) Start your web browser and set up localhost:8080 as the proxy. Disable caching between sessions within the browser. 4) a) Connect to the internet b) Tell the WWWOFFLE demon that you are online c:\wwwoffle\bin\wwwoffle -online c) Start browsing d) Tell the WWWOFFLE demon that you are offline c:\wwwoffle\bin\wwwoffle -offline e) Disconnect from the internet 5) Go back and browse the pages again while not connected, follow some different links this time (you will see a WWWOFFLE server message in the browser). 6) a) Connect to the internet b) Tell the WWWOFFLE demon that you are online c:\wwwoffle\bin\wwwoffle -online c) Tell the WWWOFFLE demon to fetch the new pages c:\wwwoffle\bin\wwwoffle -fetch d) Tell the WWWOFFLE demon that you are offline c:\wwwoffle\bin\wwwoffle -offline e) Disconnect from the internet 7) a) Go to http://localhost:8080/index/ and find the newly downloaded pages. b) Browse the new pages that have just been fetched. Running WWWOFFLE as a service ----------------------------- One way to run WWWOFFLE is to install it as a service using the cygrunsrv program that comes with the cygnus toolset. The command that you would use to do this is (all on one line): cygrunsrv -I wwwoffle -p /usr/local/sbin/wwwoffled.exe -o -a "-c /etc/wwwoffle/wwwoffle.conf -d" Win32 Problems -------------- If accessing WWWOFFLE is very slow then it could be that there are problems with performing DNS lookups to see which hosts are connecting to WWWOFFLE. Windows can use a UNIX style hosts file to specify local hostnames. The file is named c:\windows\hosts or c:\winnt\hosts and contains a list of IP addresses and hostnames. For example if you have two hosts on the 192.168.0.* subnet called host1 and host2 you would put the following in the hosts file. 192.168.0.1 host1 192.168.0.2 host2 Other Information ----------------- You should read the rest of the documentation about WWWOFFLE, in particular the FAQ and README.1st file. These should answer your questions or at least point you in the direction of how to contact me for information. There may be other UNIX biased features of WWWOFFLE in the documentation of the program itself. Since this is the first version of WWWOFFLE that works on Win32 platforms I hope that you will try and work around any problems. I will try and make sure that the next version has more applicable information. Andrew M. Bishop August 24th 2001