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Sambar Server Documentation
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| Frequently Asked Questions |
The Sambar Server was created to test a three-tier communication infrastructure modeled after the Sybase Open Client/Open Server. Soon thereafter, the idea of leveraging the infrastructure for dynamic delivery of content on the WWW resulted in the addition of an HTTP protocol stack, and efforts in supporting the notion of presistent users via HTTP.
Originally developed on a Sun Workstation (UNIX), it was ported to the PC (Windows 32) and licensed for commercial purposes. After completely rewriting the base code at the end of 1996, and adding many new features, version 3.0 began shipping in February 1997. Version 4.0 began shipping in mid-May 1997. A Linux port was performed (and integrated into the core codebase) during the 4.4 release. Version 5.0 began shipping in January 2001.
With the 4.2 release some features require a "Pro" license key to unlock additional functionality. There is no special software to download for the Pro server. The Pro license enables additional server functionality (e.g., mail server, DNS server, DHCP server). Pro license revenue helps offset the costs of maintaining the code and distributing the server. All Pro functionality can be test-driven by upgrading your server using the 'demo' license key. All customers are encouraged to fully test the server prior to paying for a license; Sambar Technologies wants every customer to be 100% satisfied with the quality and functionality of the server.
The Sambar Server does not attempt to offer all of the features or configuration options of Apache or NCSA. The focus of the Sambar Server is on an extremely simple installation, turn-key packaging, and a programmer friendly interface for extending the underlying functionality.
Future releases will likely remain on this track, including extensions to the programmer interfaces, more sample source code, and improved configuration capabilities from the system administration forms.
When implementing features that pre-exist in Apache (i.e. .htaccess functionality), every effort is made to be compatible with the Apache implementation. Similarly, ISAPI support is modeled after IIS and the JavaEngine closely follows the Tomcat implementation.
The guiding principles of the Sambar Server development are to provide a solid foundation for deploying feature rich internet applications. The server's feature set includes document browsing (HTTP, web-based Document Management), document management (FTP, WebDAV, Version Control, synchronization), shared services (email, calendar, blog etc.) and soon instant messaging. As the internet evolves, the goal of Sambar Technologies is to evolve with it and ensure our customers have a rich and easy to manage product that they can grow with.
Please see the Futures documentation for additional details.
While originally developed on a Sun Workstation (Solaris), the Sambar Server is now only available on Windows (98, NT 4.0, 2000, XP) and Linux. Availability for the Mac OS X is being considered for a future release.
You can find the most recent release of the Sambar Server at http://www.sambar.com/.
When upgrading to a new release, you should always install the new release in a new directory. There is very little "smarts" in the installer to recognize previous versions and upgrade them unless you are using the internal upgrade functionality available to Pro users via the System Administration console. The How To documentation includes an overview of the steps used to upgrade Sambar Technology's internal servers.
Pro users have the option of upgrading the server from the System Administration console. This feature contacts www.sambar.com to retrieve the latest production or preview release and upgrades the server in-place.
The Sambar Server does support SSL and ships with the latest OpenSSL libraries on Windows (it looks for the libraries in /usr/lib on Linux machines). See the SSL help pages for configuration details.
No. The introduction of client-side image maps has rendered server-side maps obsolete; there are no plans to implement this functionality.
Map files for server-side image maps are not presently supported by the Sambar Server. The modules interface can be used to implement this functionality should an enterprising programmer wish to code this up.
Microsoft does not allow third-party developers to port the FrontPage Server Extensions. Microsoft has stated that their Office suite will use the WebDAV (distributed authoring and versioning) HTTP extensions for authoring; presumably, this will replace the FrontPage extensions and it's ilk at some point. The Sambar Server supports WebDAV.
According to some users, you don't actually need the FrontPage extensions to use FrontPage to design your site, or even to publish your site to the Sambar Server. When you hit the Publish button in FrontPage, it attempts to connect directly to your server through the extensions. However, if FrontPage does not find the extensions, it automatically launches the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard instead, which transfers the file via FTP.
Ordinary web pages designed using FrontPage 98 should work fine against the Sambar Server (with FTP configured for uploading files), even without the extensions. However, you won't be able to use any of the FrontPage Components such as search, e-mail, or discussion forums on your site, nor will you be able to administer your site directly as if it were a FrontPage web located on your machine.
Lastly, you can use the FrontPage editor separately without the FrontPage Explorer. The editor is located in the \bin directory where FrontPage is installed and is called fpeditor.exe.
The Sambar Server supports Microsoft ISAPI functionality which prior to 1999 was enough to support Active Server Pages. Regretably, Microsoft has since chosen to restrict ASP installation to their own web servers (IIS).
The Sambar Server implements ASPs via the CScript package which is included with the server. This package will continue to be enhanced in subsequent releases and provides the foundation for the System User and System Administration functionality.
PHP4 and PHP4 are supported on Windows using the ISAPI interface. See the ISAPI Applications documentation for installation instructions. As well, CGI-based PHP installations are supported on all platforms.
When the Sambar Server crashes, a crash debug file SambarCrash.dbg is generated in the Sambar Server installation directory. This file provides a stack trace of the server crash that can be used by Sambar Technologies to diagnose (and hopefully) fix the server crash.
Some particularly aggressive anti-spyware applications may also be responsible for terminating the Sambar Server. Should it "crash" consistenly at a specific time of day, you might want to investigate whether one of these products is waking up and killing the server process.
This problem has been reported by users running Sambar Server as an NT Service. Microsoft has a patch for this problem. You need to get a new version of AFD.SYS and put it in your WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS directory. You can get this file from ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/hotfixes-postSP1/
ODBC32 may not be installed on your machine if you are running Windows 95/98 (see the Install documentation for the location of Microsoft's free download site. Otherwise, ODBC32 may be installed on your machine, but may not be in your path; the sambardb.dll library is linked with odbc32.dll and requires it be available. First, using Explorer, attempt to find the file ODBC32.DLL on your machine. If found, then add that directory to your path in the Control Panel. If that fails, you will need to reinstall your ODBC32 software.
This indicates a catastrophic failure of some feature during server startup. The server.log is located in the log directory where the Sambar Server is installed. The most common failure of a new server installation is a "Failure to bind to port 80"; this is most often the result of another server (i.e. IIS) running on the machine.
This indicates that you have another application, typically a mail server, running on your machine. In addition to mail servers, some antivirus software (specifically, Norton AntiVirus 2000) runs on this port to intercept POP3 traffic between your mail client and server. There is a workaround for proxy server users; those wishing to use the Sambar Mail Server must disable the application running on port 110.
The first place to look when something appears wrong with the server is in the log/server.log file. (Note: Ensure you have the fullest debugging output by manually setting the Trace Level in the [common] section of the config/config.ini file to TRACE.)
Another option is to manually telnet to the server using a windows command shell
c:\> telnet localhost 80
and request the home page. Once connected via telnet
(make sure to turn on local echo on your telnet client), type
GET / HTTP/1.0
and press return key twice.
The server should return the home page in response.
Many Java applets require that DNS be setup on your local area network in order to communicate back to the machine from which the applet was served.
The security.ini file is cached during the startup of the server to enhance performance. For this reason, when modifications are made to the security.ini file, the server must reload the security restrictions via the System Administration console. In addition, the security.ini [restrict] parameters are only used for HTTP requests; to restrict access for FTP clients [ftpdeny] or .htaccess files should be used.
There are two common causes for receiving the FORBIDDEN form when "successfully" logging into the System Administration console (that is, you get the login popup and correctly put in the username/password).
The browser caches the authentication cookie associated with your administrator login. After a server restart, this cookie is no longer valid, so you must re-login. Unfortunately, because the browser often caches pages, you may find it difficult to login without getting the Forbidden message once you have received it the first time. The solution is to clear your browser memory and disk cache and then re-login to the administration console. Additionally, you can click the reload button while holding down the shift key down to force a new page request to the server and bypass browser caching.
Users also often receive the Forbidden page if they restart the server and then use the "back" menu to return to the System Administration pages. Because these pages are in cache you are free to view the pages, but as soon as you select an option that hits the server, you receive a Forbidden message because you have not logged in the server as the system administrator.
If you forget the administrator password, your only recourse is to edit the config/passwd file and remove the encoded password in the third field (colon separated fields) of the administrator account. Then login as the administrator, no password is required, and reset the account password.
For other user accounts, you can go in as the administrator user and use the Users forms to select the user who forgot his/her password and reset their account password.
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