CONFIGURING WEB NAMING

David Huntley, Technology Evangelist

This Netscape TechNote explains how to configure a web server to support Web Naming

WEB SERVER REQUIREMENTS

When a CORBA server uses the register()function, the Web Naming service utilizes an HTTP "Put" command to store the IOR on the web server at the indicated URL.  In order for your web server to support this functionality, it must meet two pre-requisites:
  1. It must allow the use of the HTTP Put command to store files on the web server
  2. Web server security must be configured to give web naming write access to the particular location specified by the service
The following sections show how to enable these features using the Enterprise 3.0 server.

CONFIGURING ENTERPRISE 3.0 FOR WEB NAMING

Before you can configure the Enterprise 3.0 server for web naming, you will need to know the following information:
  1. The document root for your web server
  2. The directory or directory tree where your CORBA objects will be registering their IOR's, relative to the document root.  (Ex: Netscape-provided CORBA examples store their IOR's under the directory "iiop_objects" relative to the document root).  In this document, this directory will be referred to as the IOR Directory.
If you don't know the document root of your web server, you can locate this information under the "Content Management" section of the Administration Server as in the following diagram.  In this example, the document root is C:/Netscape/SuiteSpot/docs.
Once you have the above information, you will configure your server in two steps
  1. Enable Web Publishing.  This will enable the use of the Put command.
  2. Configure security to allow Web Naming to read/write from the IOR Directory.
For detailed information on how to do each of these operations, continue to the following sections.

I. ENABLE WEB PUBLISHING

  1. From the Administration Server, turn the Web Publishing state to "On" as in the following diagram.  Then, press the "OK" button, save and apply your change.
II. CONFIGURE IOR DIRECTORY SECURITY
  1. From the Administration Server, go to the "Access Control List Management" screen by selecting "Restrict Access" from the Server Preferences section.
  2. Under part C, where you can type in the ACL name, enter the root of the directory tree where the CORBA servers will be storing their IOR's.  You will need to type in the full path to the directory, according to the following template: <Server Root>/<IOR Directory>/*  In the figure below, the <Server Root> is C:/Netscape/SuiteSpot/docs, and the IOR Directory is iiop_objects.
  3. Press the "Edit Access Control" button under the field where you entered the ACL name.
  1. Next, you must enable access control, and set the permissions to the IOR Directory so that:

    2. In setting the access control rules, you must make sure that the "Users/Groups" field is always set to "anyone".  This is because the Web Naming service isn't set-up to pass user authentication information to the server.  Ex: The figure below shows how you would set the access control rules so that any machine in the 132.32.3 subnet can register a name, and any machine anywhere can resolve one.  For more information on using wildcards in access control rules, press the Help button on the Access Control Rules dialog.

  2. Afterwards, press the "Submit" button, save and apply your changes
TN-CORB-01-9709      
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