devvyn

Apparently Mac OS X 10.5 comes with the PHP module installed on the Apache web server.  The “Web Sharing” option in System Preference actually switches on a pre-installed, full-fledged web server.  I’ve known about the web server for a while, but it’s pretty cool that I didn’t have to install the PHP module.

What this is all about is I wanted to use PHP to do server side includes so I didn’t have to update as many files when I make changes to my client’s sites, but I wanted to preview the pages while I worked on them.  The best solution was to preview the files through the Sites folder on my Mac by steering my browser to http://127.0.0.1/.  The Mac is now my test server!

It wasn’t working at first, though.  I had to look up some tutorials on the subject to find out how to edit the appropriate configuration files.  I went one step further and installed Webmin so I can spend less time manually editing configuration, which are annoying because they’re hidden files in hidden folders so unless I want to force Finder to show hidden files, I have to use Terminal to open the file.

On top of all that work I had somehow broken my web sharing without realizing it.  I did a port scan and found Privoxy answering port 80 instead of apached.  For the life of me I don’t know how that got there.  Once that was gone, port 80 was closed even though System Preferences showed it still open.  I checked console logs and discovered that somehow I’d lost the directory apached was trying to save log files to.  I also had no configuration file (there used to be a default one) for my user account.

When all was said and done I got it working and the whole experience has given me a better idea of how web servers work.  It was actually kind of fun.

Originally published at Devvyn.com. You can comment here or there.

So, here’s something fascinating to a geek like me that I started thinking about now that I’m back in Saskatoon (after a two-year stint in Niagara Falls).  SaskTel runs an IPTV service called “Max Interactive“.  They give their customers set top boxes made by Pace (model DSL4000 and possibly newer ones for HDTV since the launch of the service in 2003). IPTV itself is a specialized protocol but the box also uses a video on demand feature which is accessed through a web interface. (When the box calls on a video to begin playback, it uses some kind of internal resource scheme name but appears to call on an Internet resource.)

Okay, why is this fascinating? It implies that the set top box is fundamentally a computer playing videos from the Internet.  This means that it can probably be tricked into playing videos from another computer on the network, and possible from the Internet.  It also implies that with the right software, the Max Interactive service might not know the difference between a box and a computer since they both get video over ethernet connected to a regular DSL modem.

So, I want to do this but I don’t know enough of the specs on the box to understand what I can get away with.  I also don’t know enough about the network activity the box is conducting to access the Max video streams.  It may even be possible to download program listings on a computer, too.

A few people started up a promising discussion about this on a forum back in 2004.  It seems they even started a small website with a wiki about these shenanigans.  Unfortunately, the site looks defunct and the trail of information has gone cold.

Has anyone had success doing experimental things with the Pace DSL4000 or SaskTel Max?

Originally published at Devvyn.com. You can comment here or there.