If you’re running a web server on your BeOS machine, you can maintain your site from any other machine in the world via telnet. While this may seem old hat to Linux users, it’s a pleasant surprise for those coming from the Windows or MacOS worlds. Enable the telnet daemon in the Network preferences panel and restart networking. You can now log in to your machine from anywhere and operate it completely from the command line.
Note: Be very careful about choosing a complex telnet password, don’t give it to anyone, and change it frequently. Remember that the BeOS file permissions scheme as of R4.5 is not fully multi-user, making it particularly vulnerable should your password be obtained by hooligans.
Once that’s set up, you can stop and start the http daemon from the command line. If necessary, you can even restart networking with John Wiggins‘ net_restart utility. You can add or delete web pages, or even restart your machine (with shutdown -r).
If you want to edit existing web pages, you can use the built-in editor vi, or download and install any of the other command-line editors, such as joe, jove, or emacs. If you install Pine, the text-based email client, you’ll also get Pico — a simple to use text editor. Since you’re editing files right on your hard drive, there’s no need to FTP files into place (though that’s also an option if you enable the telnet server).