OpenACS Installation Guide for Windows2000
By Matthew Burke and Curtis Galloway
NOTE: These instructions were
valid for ACS v4, but have not been tested with OpenACS. Currently
(8/2002), the best option to get OpenACS &version; running on Windows
is to use VMware and John
Sequeira's Oasis VM
distribution
Source: http://software.arsdigita.com/dist
Bug reports: acs-bugs@arsdigita.com
Philosophy: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/community
(the community chapter of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web
Publishing)
Technical background: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/
Overview
With the recent release of a win32 version of AOLserver, it is now
possible to run the OpenACS on Windows2000 and Windows98. This document
explains the steps necessary to get the OpenACS installed and running on your
machine. Note: We do not recommend running a production
server on Windows98. But the platform is more than sufficient for working
the problem sets and
for getting a feel for the OpenACS.
You'll need to use the ArsDigita binary distribution of AOLserver
for the Win32 platform, which contains patches for several problems we
have come across in the default AOLserver binary distribution. See the ArsDigita AOLserver 3 distribution page for
details.
You can download the binary distribution from the ArsDigita download page
under "ArsDigita AOLserver 3 Binary Distribution for Win32."
Please read the release notes in the distribution for configuration notes
specific to the version you are downloading.
Prerequisites
Windows 2000 or Windows 98
WinZip or any tool that can
extract gzipped/tarred archives.
zsh (free;
included in the binary distribution). If this link is broken try http://www.zsh.org.
Oracle 8 relational database
management system
AOLserver (free)
ArsDigita
Oracle driver for AOLserver (free)
It is helpful if you have Oracle interMedia Text for full-text searches.
We're also trying to make our system work with the PLS System,
available free from http://www.pls.com.
Although the zsh shell is the only command-line tool
required to install the OpenACS, if you are a UNIX person used to typing
ls instead of dir you'll get along much
better with the Cygwin toolkit from RedHat (available at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin).
This is a development library and set of tools that gives you a very
UNIX-like environment under Windows. In particular, it includes
bash, gzip and tar, which you can
use to perform the OpenACS installation instead of WinZip and zsh.
Your Oracle installation
When you install Oracle, a good rule of thumb is "every default
setting is wrong." We will not discuss Oracle configuration here
except to mention that the OpenACS requires Oracle's NLS_DATE_FORMAT
parameter be set to 'YYYY-MM-DD'. Fixing this depends on whether
Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows NT (yes,
that's Windows NT) will run on your
machine or not (in some cases, it will complain about Microsoft Managment
Console not being installed).
If it runs on your machine, proceed as follows:
Run Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows NT
Navigate using the Explorer-style control in the left panel and
select the Oracle Home for the database you wish to use.
Bring up its properties dialog and add a parameter NLS_DATE_FORMAT
with value 'YYYY-MM-DD' (without the
quotes)
Verify the date format by logging into the database using SQL Plus
and run the following query: select sysdate from
dual;
Otherwise you will need to perform a little registry surgery as
follows:
Run regedit and navigate down the registry keys to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ORACLE.
Choose the appropriate subtree; this will be HOME0 if
you only have on einstallation of Oracle.
If you are an Oracle achiever and have more than one Oracle
installation on your machine, you will see HOME0, HOME1,
HOME2, etc. Choose the subtree that corresponds to the
Oracle installtion you wish to use with the OpenACS.
If the NLS_DATE_FORMAT key is already present,
double-click on its value and change it to 'YYYY-MM-DD'
(without the quotes). If the key does not
exist, choose Edit->New->String Value from the menu
and type NLS_DATE_FORMAT for the name of the new value to
create it. Then double-click on the empty value to change it.
Verify the date format by logging into the database using SQL Plus
and run the following query: select sysdate from
dual;
For more information on Oracle configuration look at http://photo.net/wtr/oracle-tips
or search the Web/db Q&A
Forum. One other note: the "nuke a user" admin page and
Intermedia won't run unless you set open_cursors = 500
for your database. For more information on Oracle configuration look at
http://photo.net/wtr/oracle-tips.html
or search the Web/db Q&A
Forum. One other note: the "nuke a user" admin page and
Intermedia won't run unless you set open_cursors = 500
for your database.
The ArsDigita binary installation
Extract the ArsDigita AOLserver distribution onto the C:
drive into the default aol30 directory. You can install it
on any drive, but it will make your life easier if you keep the AOLserver
binary and your OpenACS instance on the same drive. For the rest of these
instructions, we'll assume that you used drive C:.
Untar the OpenACS
We recommend rooting webserver content in c:\web. Since most
servers these days are expected to run multiple services from multiple IP
addresses, each server gets a subdirectory from c:\web. For
example, http://scorecard.org would be rooted at
c:\web\scorecard on one of our machines and if
http://jobdirect.com were on the same box then it would be
at c:\web\jobdirect.
For the sake of argument, we're going to assume that your service
is called "yourdomain", is going to be at
http://yourdomain.com and is rooted at
c:\web\yourdomain in the Windows 2000 file system. Note that
you'll find our definitions files starting out with
"yourdomain.com".
download the OpenACS (see above) into
c:\temp\acs.tar.gz
use WinZip (or equivalent) to extract the files to
c:\web\yourdomain
You'll now find that c:\web\yourdomain\www contains the
document root and c:\web\yourdomain\tcl contains Tcl scripts
that are loaded when the AOLserver starts up.
Feeding Oracle the Data Model
The entire server will behave in an unhappy manner if it connects to
Oracle and finds that, for example, the users table does not exist. Thus
you need to connect to Oracle as whatever user the AOLserver will connect
as, and feed Oracle the table definitions.
load the states, country_codes and
counties tables using the load-geo-tables
shell script in the c:\web\yourdomain\www\install
directory. You will need to open a console window and run
zsh load-geo-tables foo/foopassword
You most likely will see a slew of "Commit point reached . . .
" messages. This does not indicate a problem.
cd to c:\web\yourdomain\www\doc\sql and feed Oracle the
.sql files that you find there. There is a meta-loader file,
load-data-model.sql, that includes the other files in the proper
order. To use it, open a console window and run
sqlplus foo/foopassword < load-data-model.sql
If you have interMedia installed, while still in
c:\web\yourdomain\www\doc\sql, run
zsh load-site-wide-search foo foopassword ctxsys-password
Note that there's no slash between foo and
foopassword here. The third argument,
ctxsys-password, is the password for interMedia
Text's special ctxsys user.
Configuring AOLServer
You will need two configuration files. The first is a Tcl file with
configuration information for AOLserver. This should be called
yourdomain and should be located in
c:\aolserve3_0. The second is an .ini file that configures
the OpenACS and is discussed below. Note that pathnames in
yourdomain must use forward slashes rather than the Windows
back slashes. This is also true for the .ini file.
The following items must be defined in yourdomain:
three database pools: main, subquery, and log. They must be named
as such. The default pool will be "main".
the auxconfig directory which contains the .ini file:
c:\web\yourdomain\parameters
the pageroot: c:\web\yourdomain\www
the directory containing the TclLibrary:
c:\web\yourdomain\tcl
You can use our template file as a starting
point (you'll need to save this file with a rather than .txt
extension).
Configuring OpenACS itself
If you want a system that works, go to
c:\web\yourdomain\parameters and copy ad.ini to
yourdomain.ini (or any other name different from
ad.ini). You don't actually have to delete
ad.ini.
Each section of yourdomain.ini has a hardcoded
"yourservername" in the name (e.g.
[ns/server/yourservername/acs]). This means that the OpenACS
will ignore your configuration settings unless your AOLserver name
happens to be "yourservername". Therefore you must go through
yourdomain.ini and change "yourservername" to
whatever you're calling this particular AOLserver (look at the
server name in the nsd file for a reference).
Unless you want pages that advertise a community called
"Yourdomain Network" owned by
"webmaster@yourdomain.com", you'll probably want to edit
the text of yourdomain.ini to change system-wide parameters.
If you want to see how some of these are used, a good place to look is
c:\web\yourdomain\tcl\ad-defs. The Tcl function,
ad_parameter, is used to grab parameter values from the .ini
file.
Starting the Service
Now you're ready to start things up. Before installing as a Windows
service, you might want to test the setup for configuration errors. Open
up a console window and go to c:\aol30. Then run
bin\nsd -ft yourdomain.tcl
This will print all the AOLserver messages to the console so you can see
them.
Try to connect to your new server with a web browser. If you see the
message "Error in serving group pages", you probably forgot to
copy the ad.ini file in c:\web\yourdomain\parameters If
everything seems ok, you can kill the server with Control-c and then
issue the following command to install as a Windows service:
bin\nsd -I -s yourdomain -t yourdomain.tcl
You can now configure error recovery and other Windows aspects of the
service from the Services control panel. If you make further changes to
yourdomain or yourdomain.ini you should stop
and start the service from the Services control panel.
Configuring Permissions
Now, you need to protect the proper administration directories of the
OpenACS. You decide the policy although we recommend requiring the admin
directories be accessible only via an SSL connection. Here are the
directories to consider protecting:
/doc (or at least /doc/sql/ since some AOLserver configurations
will allow a user to execute SQL files)
/admin
any private admin dirs for a module you might have written that are
not underneath the /admin directory
Adding Yourself as a User and Making Yourself a Sysadmin
The ArsDigita Community System will define two users: system and
anonymous. It will also define a user group of system administrators.
You'll want to add yourself as a user (at /register/ ) and then add
yourself as as member of the site-wide administration group. Start by
logging out as yourself and logging in as the system user (email of
"system"). Change the system user's password. Visit the
https://yourservername.com/admin/ug/ directory and add your
personal user as a site-wide administrator. Now you're bootstrapped!
If you do not know what the system user's password is connect to
Oracle using SQL Plus and run the following query:
select password from users where last_name = 'system';
Closing Down Access
The OpenACS ships with a user named "anonymous" (email
"anonymous") to serve as a content owner. If you're
operating a restricted-access site, make sure to change the anonymous
user's password. In recent versions of the OpenACS you cannot log into
"anonymous" because the account does not have a valid user
state. Log in as a sysadmin and change the anonymous user's password
from https://yourservername/admin/users. You should read the
documentation for user registration and
access control and decide what the appropriate user state is for
anonymous on your site.
Where to Find What
A few pointers:
the /register directory contains the login and registration
scripts. You can easily redirect someone to /register/index to have
them login or register.
the /pvt directory is for user-specific pages. They can only be
accessed by people who have logged in.
Making sure that it works
Run the acceptance tests in /doc/acceptance-test
Running Multiple Instances of the OpenACS
You can run multiple instances of the OpenACS on a physical machine but they
must each be set up as a separate Windows service. Each instance of the
OpenACS must have its own:
Oracle tablespace and a user account with the appropriate
permissions on that tablespace. Each of these tablespaces must have the
OpenACS data model loaded.
file with the appropriate settings including server name,
auxconfig, ipaddress, and port.
Copy of the acs files in an appropriate directory under
c:\web.
Suppose you wish to run two services: lintcollectors.com and
iguanasdirect.com. You would need the following:
an Oracle tablespace, lintcollectors with a user
lintcollectors and password secretlint
an Oracle tablespace, iguanasdirect with a user
iguanasdirect and password secretiguanas
For each of these tablespaces/users you would load the OpenACS data model as
described above. Then in c:\aolserver3_0
create files for each service, i.e. lintcollectors and
iguanasdirect. These files would point to their respective
pageroots, c:\web\lintcollectors\www and
c:\web\iguanasdirect\www; their respective auxconfigdirs,
c:\web\lintcollectors\parameters and
c:\web\iguanasdirect\parameters; etc. In the respective
auxconfigdirs would be the files lintcollectors.ini and
iguanasdirect.ini.
Now open a console window and go to c:\aol30. You'll
start up the two services as follows:
bin\nsd -I -s lintcollectors -t lintcollectors.tcl
bin\nsd -I -s iguanasdirect -t iguanasdirect.tcl
In the services control panel you should see two services:
AOLserver-lintcollectors and
AOLserver-iguanasdirect.
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