Looking for general advice on complex program

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 3:41 AM, Josh English
<Joshua.R.English at gmail.com> wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Thank you for spelling this out. I thought about this as a solution but I don't have the skills to create this server application, and I don't know if the target network can handle this request. They can see files on a shared drive. They can't see each other's computers on the network, and I don't know if I can make a socket work.
>
> I do know they put an internal wiki in the system, and if I could figure out how to do these requests over HTTP, I may try that, but that seems to be the wrong solution.

If you can do HTTP, then that presumably means you can do TCP/IP. You
can run this daemon on a high port to avoid having to run it as root
(only an issue on Unix), and all you need to know is the IP address or
host name of the computer that's running it.

Or alternatively, you can actually do this via HTTP - if you already
have a web server running and it'd be easier to do it that way. I'm
more inclined to having it separate, but it might be simpler to write
it as a PHP script (or whatever your web server uses). Just have it
accept POST requests to update files; but in this case, be *very* sure
that your security is in place - the last thing you want is a way for
people out on the internet to edit your files. Check IP addresses and
such, as well as a username/password check.

Chris Angelico