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## OpenACS Installation Guide for Windows2000

by Matthew Burke and Curtis Galloway

OpenACS docs are written by the named authors, and may be edited by OpenACS documentation staff.

NOTE: These instructions were valid for ACS v4, but have not been tested with OpenACS and the ArsDigita binary distributions are no longer available. Currently (10/2003), the best option to get OpenACS 5.4.2 running on Windows is to use VMware and John Sequeira's Oasis VM distribution

- Source: http://openacs.org/projects/openacs/download

- Bug reports: http://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs

- 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)

- 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:

1. Run Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows NT

2. Navigate using the Explorer-style control in the left panel and select the Oracle Home for the database you wish to use.

3. Bring up its properties dialog and add a parameter NLS_DATE_FORMAT with value 'YYYY-MM-DD' (without the quotes)

4. 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:

1. Run `regedit` and navigate down the registry keys to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ORACLE`.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 OpenACS forums. 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

OpenACS 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`.

($Id: win2k-installation.html,v 1.42.4.3 2008/05/31 20:46:16 donb Exp $)

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