4.7 Configuring and Using a Small Web Server
The kpf utility provides simple file sharing using
HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), which is the same
protocol used by Web sites to provide data to your Web browser. kpf is
strictly a public file server, which means that there are no access
restrictions to shared files. Whatever you select for sharing is available
to anyone.
IMPORTANT: Security Considerations
Before setting up a file server with kpf, check with your system
administrator whether your company's security policies allow this. You
should never set up a file server in a corporate or private environment if
you are not entirely sure that your network is protected by an outer
firewall. Otherwise you might risk accidentally leaking sensitive
information to the Web. In addition to that, any Web server is a potential
target for hacker's exploits. Setting up a Web server in a secure way is a
very hard job and kpf was not designed to act as such a Web server.
kpf is designed to be used for sharing files with friends, not to
act as a fully-fledged Web server like Apache. kpf was primarily
conceived as an easy way to share files with others while chatting on IRC
(Internet Relay Chat, or chat rooms).
kpf is typically set up to serve files from a
public_html folder in your home directory. For example,
if you want to make a file available to some people with whom you are
chatting online, you can use kpf to copy the file into your
public_html folder and announce to those listening that
your file is available at
https://www.mymachine.net:8001/thefile (rather than send
them each an e-mail with the file attached).
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Right-click the bottom panel in KDE then click and select .
A new icon depicting a small globe appears on the bottom
panel.
-
Right-click the icon then click .
-
Specify the directory containing the files you want to share then
click .
All files in the folder and its subfolders, including hidden files
(files that start with a dot) and symbolic links, are made publicly
available, so be careful not to share sensitive information, such as
passwords, cryptographic keys, your address book, or documents private to
your organization. Make sure that any symbolic links included do not point
outside your published folder, because that would give others access to
areas of your system that are not intended for public viewing.
-
Complete the remainder of the .
The directory icon now appears in Konqueror with a world icon at the
bottom right side.
Other parties wishing to connect to this server should just enter a
URL like
https://hostname:8001 into
their browsers. An
overview of the published content is displayed.
On the hosting machine, you can monitor the network traffic on your file
server by right-clicking the globe icon and selecting
. A short set of statistics similar to the following is
given.
