BRS WebWeaver - Frequently Asked Questions

These are questions that I have been emailed. The answers are posted here.

1. How should / can I use the IP Address Security options ? What is the purpose, and what should I fill in the URL and address fields?

IP Security allows you to specify what IP Addresses will be allowed to access what URL's. Say you are on a company LAN where you use 137.65.*.* for all company addresses. You could add "/" as the URL and 137.65 as the IP Address. This would allow only people who have IP Address that start with 137.65 access anything on the web server. If you only want you to get to a directory /docs/mystuff/ you could add that as a URL and your IP address and then you could only access that folder from your machine.

2. What is Realm security, what is the purpose, how can I use it and what is the difference with IP Address Security ?

The concept is similar to IP Security, but differs in that it uses users, not IP addresses. If you were to put "/" as a URL and bob as a user, then you would have to authenticate as bob before accessing anything on the web server. If you want only you to access /docs/mystuff/ but you want to be able to access it from different machines, then you can add /docs/mystuff/ as the URL and your user name. Then whenever someone tries to access /docs/mystuff/ or anything below it, it asks them to authenticate.

3. How can I use the ISAPI settings (alias and real path)? I'm planning to create ISAPI dll's, so this is really important to me...

ISAPI Alias is the only directory where ISAPI extensions will be executed. If an ISAPI dll is placed in another directory, and is executed, it will prompt the user to download the dll like it was any other binary file. I uses /scripts/ for a ISAPI alias. you can use whatever you want. Say that I had a directory c:\isapi\dll that had a file mydll.dll in it. I would set the alias to /scripts/ and the path to c:\isapi\dll. Then when the url of /scripts/mydll.dll is requested, mydll.dll will be handled as an ISAPI extension.

4. And how / where can I use the Aliases for directories ? I've the idea that this can be very useful and tried some things, but I'm not sure if I'm on the right track...

Alias allow you to have things move around without changing the URLS. If I have a URL /images/background.gif, but the /images/ directory takes up a lot of space, I can move /images/ to a different hard drive and create an alias of /images/ that points to the new location.