Upgrading an ACS installation to AOLserver 3.0

Configuration Changes

AOLserver 3 removed a lot of functionality from AOLserver 2.3.3 that ACS depends on. We've either copied implementions from our AOLserver 2.3.3 installation or reimplemented them from scratch.

You'll need to have 000-aolserver-3-specific.tcl in your tcl library, which is in /tcl in a typical ACS installation.

You'll also need to have the newer 2.0 or later version of the ArsDigita Oracle Driver

Tcl page support is also needed. You can either pick up Rob Mayoff's Tcl page module, which is a C-based add-on which includes caching of tcl pages, or the original file.tcl. ??? Maybe just include file.tcl's guts in 000-aolserver-3-specific.tcl ???

Inittab Changes

If you have more than one AOLserver process which has the same server name (e.g. photonet.ini has a server named photonet, and photonet-dev.ini also calls its server photonet), you need to not use the -k (kill) option in inittab. AOLserver 3 stores the process ID (pid) in log/nspid.servername. If there's two servers with the same server name, they'll end up trying to kill each other. (need more coherent explanation of why)

.ini Changes

To make ns_register_adptag work (which includes things like <codeexample> defined in teaching-defs.tcl) you'll need to have this configuration file entry:

[ns/server/photonet/adp/parsers]
fancy=.adp

By default, AOLserver 3 uses the plain ADP parser which doesn't support things like streaming, the <script> tag, and registerested ADP tags. The fancy parser adds these back in.

To make your log files roll in a Y2K compliant fashion, be sure you have a rollfmt which uses %Y (4 digit year) and not %y (2 digit year):

[ns/server/photonet/module/nslog]
RollFmt=%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M

You no longer need to suppy a systemScope=on entry in the [ns/threads] section.