webinterface enable: howto

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi,
	There has been several more changes to the web-interface included in the 
trunk. Namely, the static html page is removed and all html is generated from 
an xml file and xml data (+xslt + css). The UI looks much better. It also 
provides a way to view information about the beagled process and shutdown 
beagled. The hits are now categorized and the categories can be shows/hidden 
by checkboxes. And most importantly it has a new (based on beagle-project 
logo) logo :-).

	Enough advertising. The webinterface is now available in trunk (with the 
files served by the server is in the location pointed to by 
BEAGLE_WEBSERVER_DIR) but disabled by default. There are two config options 
related to this:
1) config:Networking - option:ServiceEnabled = turns on/off network search. 
WebInterface is turned on at the first available port after 4000. This has to 
be set before beagled is started. Local beagled (thus the webinterface too) 
can be queried from anywhere in the network 
(http://<ip_address/hostname>:4000).
  $ beagle-config Networking ServiceEnabled
2) config:Networking - option:WebInterface = turns on/off webinterface, only 
if ServiceEnabled is false. This can be set/unset even when beagled is 
running and the webinterface will be accordingly started or stopped. The 
webinterface is only accessible from localhost (http://localhost:4000).
  $ beagle-config Networking WebInterface

Due to a couple of mono bugs (fixed and to be available in mono-1.2.6), even 
when the web interface is apparently stopped (and trying to access 
http://localhost:4000 results in a failure), beagled keeps on listening on 
port 4000. This is harmless since nothing can be accessed via that port (but 
still an open port, so you should know this fact).
And mono HttpListener listens on all interfaces - but again this is harmless, 
because illegal access is denied (e.g. only setting WebInterface to true 
causes beagled to listen on port 4000 on all interfaces, but only queries 
from localhost are allowed).

The hits displayed in the webinterface are clickable links. On firefox 1.5, 
clicking the links to open in a new tab causes the file to open; on firefox 
2.0 and above, opening of local files is completely disallowed due to 
security reasons. There are user configurable options to override this and 
allow the user to click on hits and open results - we will describe them in 
detail sometime soon.

- dBera

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user