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Grumpy - The most grouchy http & gopher server out there!

Introduction

Grumpy is a simple, easy to install, open-source web & Gopher server for Linux and Windows. Grumpy is not a standalone daemon - it requires an inetd-compatible superserver to work (already provided in the Windows package). Why one would prefer Grumpy over any other web server, like Apache, Lighttp, Jigsaw...? Well, I wrote Grumpy primarily for fun, but it appears to have become a rather strong web server with some very good points: easy to install, lightweight, secure (as it doesn't support any dangerous features)... Besides that, Grumpy supports the gopher protocol, too, and can be easily used as a secure https server. The Grumpy web server is meant to be used for small projects, like home servers, some intranet applications, small-sized companies, etc. All the configuration is done via a single configuration file, which has very reasonable defaults. That makes Grumpy easily maintainable, and allows the administator to have a full knowledge of what features are allowed/enabled on the server. Grumpy supports CGI applications, and is entirely written in FreeBASIC.

How to install Grumpy on my system?

Installing Grumpy on a Linux host is very easy. On the first place you will have to copy grumpy to /sbin/, and grumpy.cfg to /etc/. As I said previously, Grumpy needs an inetd-like superserver to work. If using the basic inetd, you will have to add the following line to /etc/inetd.conf:

www   stream   tcp   nowait   www-data   /sbin/grumpy   grumpy

The important things here are: "www", which is the name of the service to bind to. You will have to check if the www service has its entry in /etc/services. "www-data" is the name of the user which has to be used to run the grumpy process. Obviously, you will have to check if the www-data user exists on your system, and let him write to /var/log/grumpy.log, read from /etc/grumpy.cfg and execute /sbin/grumpy. When the inetd configuration is done, you'll have to restart the superserver (or the whole machine). Obviously, you will have to add a second entry for the Gopher protocol (if you plan to serve Gopher, too).

For any further technical informations, go read the manual!

What's this inetd thing you're talking about?

Primarily, inetd is used to spawn other daemons. It is sometimes referred to as the "Internet Super-Server" because it manages connections for several services. When a connection is received by inetd, it determines which program the connection is destined for, spawns the particular process and delegates the socket to it (the program is invoked with the service socket as its standard input, output and error descriptors). Running inetd for servers that are not heavily used can reduce the overall system load, when compared to running each daemon individually in stand-alone mode. A nice replacement for inetd is xinetd, which offers a more secure super-server service.

Legal stuff

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

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Copyright © Mateusz Viste 2008 - 2010 Is the Grumpy server useful to you? Donate or contribute!