Please pardon my ignorance, but I need to create a web-based form which can be used to request access to the unix servers in our environment. It just needs to have input fields for basic info (name, dept., etc.), and perhaps a drop-down box with the names of the servers. The form will be submitted to someone who is authorized to approve the id. I haven't any idea how to go about this. Can you point me in a general direction (i.e., which program to use to create it?).
Well, the form itself is just a webpage. If it's static, you could make it totally separate -- just pure HTML. It would call a CGI script, which you could write in a language you know. (What languages DO you know?)
Here's a simple introduction to forms, and a little example:
<html>
<form method='post' action="/cgi-bin/my-handler.sh">
<input type='text' name='value'>
<input type='submit'>
</form></html>
#!/bin/sh
# my-handler.sh
# doesn't have to be a shell script, you can write in whatever languages
# are available on your server...
# Every CGI script needs to start its output at least with a header saying
# what type of data it is, followed by a blank line.
echo "Content-type: text/plain"
echo
echo "You POSTed the following data:"
# Data will come into stdin as strings like var=value&var2=value2
# tr will read everything from stdin and print it to stdout, converting &
# to \n as it goes, printing them to the client's browser.
tr '&' '\n'
echo
# The server sets a bunch of different variables about itself, the client,
# the page being requested, etc. 'env' prints absolutely everything.
echo "The server provided the following variables:"
env
exit 0
The script goes in your webserver's cgi-bin directory (or your own private cgi-bin directory if you have one). If you can get that page working with that CGI script you can work up from there...
THANKS so much for your help. At least I have a starting point....