Gnuserv for NT

This is a somewhat modified version of Andy Norman's Gnuserv package. See the enclosed README for more details.

September 12, 1999. Guy Gascoigne - Piggford <guy@wyrdrune.com>

This is a port of the original Internet socket version of gnuserv to NT and Win95. As well as allowing the usual connection from client to server when both are executing on the same machine, this version allows connections to be made over a network from a telnet or xterm on a Unix machine to an Emacs and gnuserv on an NT machine.

On the whole I've taken bits and pieces from both the version written by Peter Breton & Nico Francois as well as the original version by Andy Norman.

I took Andy Norman's stock Unix version and ported the socket code over to NT (coincidentally this seems to work on Win9x). To this I added some of the NT specific stuff from Peter Breton & Nico Francois' version.

Changes from either version.

1. This version only uses sockets for connection on NT. There is no mailslot support in this port. This does mean that it can accept connections from other machines.
   
2. As per the original docs you need to set the environment variable GNU_SECURE if you want to be able to make connections from other machines.
   
3. Unlike the original docs, connections from the local machine are allowed without adding the localhost to the GNU_SECURE file. I judged that local connections are going to be much less of a security threat on a single user NT machine than they would be on a potentially multi-unser Unix machine. Of course if you end out running NT Terminal Server you may want to compile a version with this switched off.
   
4. There is support for topping the Emacs window in both gnuserv as well as gnuclient. See later for details.
   
5. gnuclientw is exactly the same as gnuclient except that it defaults to topping the Emacs window. It is also compiled as a Windows application, this means that it doesn't flash up a console window when run.
   
6. Since I didn't want to get into changing the emacs-lisp I added support into gnuserv to allow it to top it's emacs window. The reason being that gnuclient can only top the window when it's run from the same machine as the server. By default this support is disabled but defining the environment variable GNUSERV_SHOW_EMACS enables it.
   Either define in globally or add:
   (setenv "GNUSERV_SHOW_EMACS" "1")         ; force gnuserv to show emacs  window, always
   to your .emacs file.
   
7. I didn't bother trying to get the unix uid function working in a useful manner on NT. This means that unlink the unix version the port used is the default value as opposed to the default value + uid. This only really matters to you if you try to get separate machines to talk to each other, in which case you'll want to explicity set the port value by setting GNU_PORT.
   
8. For example, I have NT emacs with gnuserv running on my NT machine. I have GNU_SECURE set and pointing to a file containing a list of machine names that I want to accept connections from.
   
9. In my .bashrc on Solaris I have:
   
   export GNU_PORT=21490 # the default port number
   export GNU_HOST=cerebus# my NT machine
   export GNU_NODE=/ggp@`hostname`: # a suitable ange-ftp prefix
   
   export EDITOR=gnuclient
   alias gc=gnuclient
   
   With this set, I can telnet into a unix machine, type 'gc filename' and have it pop up in my editor on NT. This is so much faster than having to muck around with a different editor instance on every machine that I'm logged into.
   
10. If Emacs isn't running on the NT machine, gnuclient will attempt to start it. First it looks in the registry for the path. This should be there is addpm has been run, failing that it attempts to find runemacs on the path. The registry check should meean that you don't need to add the emacs bin directory to your path any longer.
    
11. Added a -x (execute) option to gnuclient[w]. This simply makes sure that Emacs is running and visible. I got fed up of running Runemacs only to find that it was already running but minimized.
    
12. Added a -e (evaluate) option to gnuclient[w]. This causes the following elisp to be evaluated. This pretty much obsoletes gnudoit. The advantage of doing it this way is that since a good chunk of the code between the two is common, this allow all of the NT specific modifications to gnuclient to be available with the functionality of gnudoit. E.g. checking that emacs is running and showing the window.
    
13. There is a full VC6 project included as well as makefile for unix. The binaries were built using VC6SP3.
    

NOTE: The win9x support is barely tested, do let me know if there are any problems.

This gnuserv can be downloaded here.

Last modified : Wednesday, May 24, 2000 20:10