Simple AOLserver Install Guide

Roberto Mello (rmello@cc.usu.edu)

June 2000 - OpenACS 3.2.2 final

Abstract

A simple AOLserver installation guide. My development box is a marvelous
Debian GNU/Linux system, so if this doesn't work on a platform other
than GNU/Linux, it's probably due to some specific thing.

\tableofcontents{}

1 Getting the best web server up and running

1.1 What you need

* GCC (GNU Compiler Collection)

* GMake (GNU Make - Default in GNU/Linux)

* Development libraries including glibc and libpthread

* GNU tar and Gzip

1.2 Downloading and UN-tarring

Create a user and group for AOLserver, such as nsadmin. In GNU/Linux
you would do:

addgroup nsadmin

adduser -g nsadmin nsadmin


Get the AOLserver source (not the binaries, unless you know what you're
doing) distribution from http://www.aolserver.com/dist \protect\url{http://www.aolserver.com/dist}.

Untar it at some temporary directory such as /usr/local/src with the
following command:

tar xzvf aolserver3_0.tar.gz

1.3 Building and Installing

cd into the newly created directory (aolserver3_0 for AOLserver 3.0)
and do a:

make (or gmake if you are not using GNU/Linux)


Once the compilation process is over, it's time to install AOLserver.
Choose a directory to install AOLserver at, such as /home/aolserver.
Then do a:

make install INST=/home/aolserver


Now change the ownership of the directory where you installed AOLserver
with:

chown -R nsadmin:nsadmin /home/aolserver

1.4 Testing and Configuring

AOLserver comes with two nsd (the main AOLserver daemon) files: nsd76
and nsd8x. nsd76 uses Tcl 7.6, which is an AOLserver-hacked Tcl version
highly optimized for multithreading and performance. nsd8x uses Tcl
8.3 which offers some nice extra regular expressions features, byte
code compiler and other things. In my personal experience nsd76 is
a bit faster, so choose it according to your needs. Simply make a
symbolic link to the file of your choice (nsd -> nsd76 or nsd -> nsd8x).

To do a quick-test on your AOLserver installation, CD into the AOLserver
directory and (as the AOLserver user - e.g. nsadmin) do a:

./bin/nsd -kt nsd.tcl


Then with your browser, go to yourdomain.com:8000 and you should see
AOLserver's default page.

Find AOLserver's PID (ps aux | grep nsd) and kill it (kill -9 pid).
You can then use our nsd.tcl \protect\url{../nsd.txt} to configure
your AOLserver. More information on the nsd.tcl config file can be
found in doc/config.txt in the AOLserver source tree.

1.5 Setting it to be restarted

AOLserver must be started as root so it can use the priviledged ports
80 and 443. You need to pass the user and group to which it will switch
right after starting. 

The most common way to have AOLserver restarted even if the computer
needs to be rebooted is by including it in your /etc/inittab file.
Include a line like this in your /etc/inittab:


as:2345:respawn:/home/aolserver/bin/nsd -it /home/aolserver/nsd.tcl
-u nsadmin -g nsadmin


As of OpenACS 3.2.2, if you need to you can restart AOLserver right
from the OpenACS admin pages. To restart it from the command line
use the ``-k'' flag to nsd (e.g. /home/aolserver/bin/nsd -kt /home/aolserver/nsd.tcl
-u nsadmin -g nsadmin).

1.6 Securing Your Installation

It is safer to run AOLserver in a chrooted environment. I am not including
instructions here for simplicity's sake. Follow these links to learn
how to do it.

http://www.aolserver.com/documentation/3.0/admin/sec-ch2.html#8704 \protect\url{http://www.aolserver.com/documentation/3.0/admin/sec-ch2.html#8704}

http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/security \protect\url{http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/security}