Really OldNetscape Server Information

Server Patches

You can find patches for Netscape Servers on Netscape's Server help site at http://help.netscape.com/business/filelib.html.

Recently upgrades have been in the form of full releases rather than a replacement of a shared library or program and these upgrades will not be found on this site. For release upgrades check out http://home.netscape.com/testdrive/download/index.html

Technical Knowledge Base

A wide array of questions and answers are available through Knowledge Base Articles submitted by the Netscape support engineers at http://help.netscape.com/business/search.html

You can find help here on servers, clients and nearly every product that Netscape produces.

Directory Server

DN string

In Directory Server 1.x, the Distinguished Name (DN) of entries created using the Admin server Users & Groups used the Common Name (CN). With Directory Server 3.x and 4.x the DN instead uses the UID field to provide for more uniqueness.

You can go back to the old way (using CN) in DS 3.x by changing the file: 

[server-root]/admin-serv/config/dsgw-orgperson.conf

change the line

var useUidForDN = true;

to

var useUidForDN = false;
Now users will be created with a DN starting with "cn=firstname surname" instead of "uid=userid"

Directory SDK

You can download a C or Java LDAP SDK complete with SSL support from http://developer.netscape.com/tech/directory/downloads.html

I've written a sample program to demonstrate how to change a user's password over LDAP as a CGI program. This is based on the changepw program that we used to distribute with Enterprise 2.x to change passwords in the dbm database. You can download the source to this here

Collabra Server

This seems to fix 99 out of 100 problems with the News/Collabra Server.

Stop any expire processes that are running, stop News Server, and from a shell:

  1. Set the NS_NEWSCONF environment variable to point to your nsnews.conf file, which is normally located in [server root]/[news server name]/config/nsnews.conf.

    If you're using the Bourne or Korn shells, you might type something like: 

    NS_NEWSCONF=/usr/ns-home/news-hostname/config/nsnews.conf
export NS_NEWSCONF

    where "hostname" is the name of your computer.

    Examine the nsnews.conf file; make sure that the directories specified in _PATH_TMP and other variables that deal with temporary files and directories are located in a filesystem with plenty of free space. Note hat /tmp is often located in a small filesystem. If that is the case, edit nsnews.conf to ensure that some other directory is used.

  2. Go to [server root]/bin/news/bin.

  3. With your existing active file, or preferable a fresh one from your upstream source; 

    ./makeactive -m -o > active.new


  4. mv active.new [server root]/[news server name]/logs/active

  5. rm [server root]/[news server name]logs/history*

  6. ./makehistory -b -o -i [this will probably take hours to complete]

  7. ./expire -v2 -n -s

  8. ./expireover -s -a

  9. Start the server

NSAPI Programming

I've recently started some NSAPI programming. Here are a few of the programs that I've worked on:

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