OTM: A web server with a "One Track Mind"

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Last night I decided to sit down and write a web server from scratch. Since it seems to be reasonably feature complete at this point, I've decided to unleash it upon the world. (The only thing I can think of to add would be a GUI for those who are command-line phobic).

I've named it OTM since it is a webserver with a "one track mind." And when I say one track mind, I mean it. The differentiating feature of this web server is that it will respond to every single request the same way!

Possibilities include:

Before you laugh, I can think there of a couple of niches where this type of web server could hit a sweet spot...

  1. When you need to take a website down for maitenance, but don't want to muck with changing your regular webservers configuration—just shutdown the regular webserver and fire up OTM with a placeholder message.
  2. When you want someone to be able to snag a specific file off of your desktop quickly & painlessly.

Here's a link to the source code. Like my NNTP proxy, it is written in Tcl.

—Michael A. Cleverly

Comments

robert steel: [ mail | www | link ]

Absolutely love it!

Tue, 05 Jul 2005, 20:34

Alan Anderson: [ mail | www | link ]

It works great, except that I can't figure out how to make it give up the port in a graceful shutdown. Once I've stopped my regular web server for maintenance and started up OTM, I can't start the original server successfully without logging off and back on again.

Tue, 01 Nov 2005, 09:57

mellesa: [ mail | www | link ]

Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I'll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon. Big thanks for the useful info.

Thu, 13 Apr 2023, 13:38

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