There's no place like /home

Do you remember how Dorothy wanted to leave the farm and go off and have wild adventures beyond the rainbow? Then she got hit on the head and in her fevered coma she had an adventure that was decidedly fucked up as only L. Frank Baum could make it. [Ed: I originally confused the author with Roald Dahl. Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is also fucked up. We regret any inconvenience this may have imposed.] When she came to, she concluded that she was much better off staying home forever and ever. Remember that?

I wanted to host an HTTP server on my BeOS system.

It's pretty much the same thing, right? Well naturally, I started by reading up on the selections at BeBits, and seeing what they had to say. When RobinHood didn't pan out, I tried SoloFTP. I wanted to host files in any way possible. To this extent, even using HTTP wasn't a requirement so much as a general idea or guideline. SoloFTP crashed. (The BeOS stayed up though. God bless pervasive multithreading.)

After an afternoon of testing a small handful of server software, I was starting to lose hope. I couldn't port over anything from Linux, since my version of R5 doesn't include a compiler. Every contender was required to be a pre-compiled package.

And let me tell you, BeBits is looking more like a graveyard with every passing visit.

Fear not, noble readers, I found a solution. An ideal solution that runs perfectly and performs directory listings, exactly as I need it to do. It's called PoorMan, and get this: it's in the default install. That Dorothy thing is starting to make sense, now, isn't it? I went out into the Internet, beating bushes and poking around with a stick in search of what was already on my desk, sitting there for two years waiting for me to notice it. "The Poor Man's Web Server" indeed. This is just what I was looking for, and here it sits, now happily hosting files for me in any directory I wish. I can choose the root directory, I can choose whether or not it should give a directory listing in the absence of an "index.html" file. It is just what I need, and I never needed to go looking for anything else.

Wish I'd known about it this morning.