Entries Tagged 'AOLServer' ↓

By Jon Griffin

I am going to discuss what I see as a major problem with OACS and its infrastructure. Take it for what it is; an insider look at the future for OACS as told by outsiders.

How did this report come about? Well, some of my OACS sites were actually ACS sites and have been upgraded since 1999, before OACS was even a reality. I therefore have not just history, but a vested interest in OACS.

Users have always complained, but generally it was ignored. The systems worked, so don’t rock the boat. Now, though, things have changed.

By Jon Griffin
I have added my documents related to ArsDigita, OpenACS and ACS (ArsDigita Community System). They are relevant for anyone wanting to understand OpenACS, it’s history and why some design decisions were made. There are also some pearls of database programming (specifically Oracle) in these documents.

Originally ACS was only meant to run on Oracle and AOLserver (formerly naviserver). When ACS changed to it’s new version (4.0) back in 2000 (if I remember correctly), they added a hook for multiple database backends. Originally this was for the ACS/pg (later OpenACS) project.

By Jon Griffin

/etc/inittab is evil

Why? Because it is extremely difficult to control.The solution is to use daemontools from DJ Bernstien. This allows you to easily start and stop the processes you run and also keep them alive.

Initial Setup - quick

By Jon Griffin

Summary

Getting nscgi to work with AOLserver is easy after you know some tricks. It is setup with security in mind and a couple of things are not really intuitive.

Setup

First you need to create a cgi directory. For security you should not put it in the same tree as your web directory. In other words don’t make a /web/yourserver/www/cgi directory.
I suggest creating a directory called cgi in your home directory: mkdir ~/cgi . You can then put all your cgi programs and files starting their. For an example see cvsweb.In that case I put all the files for cvsweb in ~/cgi/cvsweb and also ~/cgi/cvsweb/icons.