This page is an index of the various gadgets available on the the web servers run BareMetal and our partners. Many of these gadgets are accessed through the server side include mechanism of the Apache server that we are using. (Most of these are custom CGI scripts... Sorry, source code is NOT public.)

The list of gadgets includes:

• A page access counter.
  
  
• A gadget to show who last accessed your page.
  
  
• Some useful variables. (Such as the page modification date.)
  This goes well with the Server Side Includes (SSI) page
  
  
• Tool for processing FORMS:
  • mail2 A Powerful and simple form handling gadget.
    
    This gadget allows you to include the form results in the reply screen, an email message, and save them to a datafile.
    
    Recent updates include:
    • the ability to verify field contents (by format only) these include e-mail addresses, credit card numbers, and anything that can be matched with a PERL regular expression.
    • the ability to verify that certain fields are filled out and specify your own error message for each missing field.
    • A new and simpler method of taking secure orders.
    
    
    
  • The old forms to Email gadget.
  
  
  
• Click-able image map.
  
  
• Server side push script.
  
  
• Random or Sequenced Line of HTML tool.
  
  
• Random page tool.
  
  
• A Redirection gadget - to track links from your pages. (Here are the docs for the old version.)
  
  
• Guestbook gadget. Simple, but effective.
  
  
• A gadget for targetting a given browser. This allows you to pull out all the stops, without worrying about what this page will look like in 'some other' browser... Because you can write a page for that browser too! (Netscape 1.x, 2.x, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and "default" are supported.)
  
  
• A CGI Wrapper to allow you to write your own CGI scripts. (Also some helpful links.)
  
  
• A Password Administration gadget to allow you to control access to some areas of your web-site.
  
  
• A pair of SEARCH Tools for extracting data from TAB delimited text files. The New Scan gadget and the older find gadget.
  
  
• The search engine used by the baremetal.com site is available for general use, but you have to ask to have it setup, as it uses a customized script, some pre-built indices, and needs a daily job scheduled to refresh those indices.
  
  

Here's a few notes and some resource guides:

• A .htaccess resource page that discusses setting up redirects and error documents (amongst other things).
  
  
• And a note about referer security and /cgi-bin/ calls from off-site.
  
  
• Just a brief note: Server Side CGI Includes are enabled here. The counter and variables pages show some examples of its use.
  
  
• MySQL - The MySQL database software is supported here. This is a fairly simple SQL database when compared to Oracle, or even the flexibility of FoxPro. (It's select statement doesn't do sub-queries, but otherwise it's quite complete.)
  
  To use MySQL you need to ask us to create a separate database for you :-).
  
  
• PGP. Some information and instructions about using PGP to encrypt data.
  
  
• Secure Server. Some comments about using our secure server.
  
  
• VMail. Some very basic information about the VMail System.
  
  
• Foodora. A CGI script for reading / scanning / cleaning up overloaded POP accounts.
  
  

Some log analysis tools:

• A Referer Log Analysis program has been written and installed. Check it out! It will tell you all kinds of things that you've always wanted to know about your web-site visitors. [Accessible at http://your.site/sec-bin/referer.pl]
  
  An error.pl program available for summarizing and presenting the information in the error-log... [Accessible at http://your.site/sec-bin/error.pl]
  
  And of course there's an access.pl program to handle the access log [Accessible at http://your.site/sec-bin/access.pl] (3 logs, 3 tools :-).
  
  All the above analysis programs are still under development. Suggestions gratefully taken, although not necessarily implemented :-)
  
  [P.S. The usage stats are accessible via http://your.site/sec-bin/usage.pl]
  
  

And some off-site links to tools we use here:

• PHP (off-site link). A powerful, flexible, and easy to learn scripting language. We usually have a number of version of PHP available. This is partly because PHP tends to change fairly rapidly and the versions are not always compatible.
  
  Non standard items. We run PHP as a CGI program, _not_ as an Apache module. We do this for security reasons. This does mean that PHP is even easier to write (no permissions issues, and not restricted by safe_mode), and that a bug in someone else's script should not comprimise the integrity of your site, or privacy of your data. The CGI version of PHP can _not_ do HTTP authentication or subrequests, otherwise it should be identical. We can run a custom httpd binary for you if you need mod_php.
  
  
• MySQL The Fast and lightweight SQL server that we use.
  
  
• www.perl.com. Perl is supported. It lives in /usr/bin/perl, and should be version 5.6.1 or more current on all production serves. mod_perl can be arranged as a custom binary.
  
  

There has been a request or two for a program to convert IP addresses to hostnames and back. You can find a simple program to do just that at http://yourdomain/cgi-bin/dnsip. (It is disabled on baremetal.com due to abuse.)

And as always:

• More to come... :-)