AOLserver is a fast, reliable, and scalable web server, and the server of choice for the ArsDigita Community System. For more information on AOLserver, you can read Philip Greenspun's introduction part 1 and part 2.

Table of Contents

1. Setup User Accounts and Paths
2. Download the Distribution
3. Compile AOLserver
4. Compile the Oracle Driver
5. Install AOLserver
6. Troubleshooting the AOLserver Install
7. Appendix: Defaults

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Download the Distribution

Login as nsadmin and save files to the /tmp directory.

• Download the AOLserver distribution and the Oracle driver (needed for db connectivity and the ACS). You must download the source distribution of AOLserver in order to compile the Oracle driver.
  • AOLserver 3.1 Source Distribution
    Do not download a binary!
  • Oracle Driver 2.x

  We recommend saving these archives in the /tmp directory on your server.

• Uncompress the downloaded components; you may need to substitute different files names and account for directory names different from the ones below -- these were the files as of 9/2000 :

  $ cd /tmp    {or wherever the archives are}
  $ tar -xzf aolserver-src-3.1ad8.tar.gz
  $ tar -xzf oracle-driver-2.3.tar.gz
    

• You should now have two directory trees in the current directory: aolserver/ and oracle-driver-2.3/. Move the oracle directory under the aolserver directory to make compiling the Oracle driver easier:

  $ mv oracle-driver-2.3 aolserver
     

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Compile AOLserver

This step should be completed as the nsadmin user. You will compile the AOLserver distribution and prepare for installation.

• Login as nsadmin and cd into the aolserver/ directory where you untarred the source. You should be able to compile directly from that location:

  $ su - nsadmin
  ; Enter nsadmin password
  $ cd /tmp/aolserver
  $ make all
      

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Compile the Oracle Driver

Now you need to compile the Oracle driver to enable database connectivity.

• Change directories to the aolserver/oracle-driver-2.3 directory and start the compilation:

  $ cd /tmp/aolserver/oracle-driver-2.3
  $ make all
      

  The following compiler warning may be ignored:

  ld: warning: type and size of dynamic symbol `sskgslgf' are not defined
      

  If the compilation failed, make sure the environment variables above actually point to where you installed the AOLserver source code. If you followed our instructions, this should not be a problem. You can check the directories by doing:

  $ ls /tmp/aolserver/include
      

  If you don't see any files, then you have the wrong directories. Verify your installation of Oracle and AOLserver and try again.

  If compilation was successful, you should now have two new files in /tmp/aolserver/oracle-driver-2.3, ora8.so and ora8cass.so.

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Install AOLserver 3.1

You are now ready to install AOLserver.

• Change directories to your AOLserver source distribution and run make install to install the files:

   
  $ cd /tmp/aolserver
  $ make install
       

  The above will copy the compiled AOLserver files to /usr/local/aolserver

• You should now have a /usr/local/aolserver/bin directory. Copy the previously compiled Oracle drivers into it:

  $ cp /tmp/aolserver/oracle-driver-2.3/ora8.so /usr/local/aolserver/bin
  $ cp /tmp/aolserver/oracle-driver-2.3/ora8cass.so /usr/local/aolserver/bin
        

• The latest version of the ArsDigita Community System requires Tcl 8.3. Although this version of Tcl is included with AOLserver 3.1, it is not activated by default. There is a symbolic link pointing from nsd to nsd76 in /tmp/aolserver/bin. Change this to point to nsd8x:

  $ cd /usr/local/aolserver/bin
  $ rm nsd
  $ ln -s ./nsd8x ./nsd
        

• You will now test to ensure AOLserver is running correctly. You should be able to cd into your aolserver directory and simply start the server:

  Login as nsadmin. (it helps to be in X at this point)
  $ cd /usr/local/aolserver
  $ ./bin/nsd -t nsd.tcl
        

  As the AOLserver daemon starts up, you should see a few normal warnings (listed below), which are safe to ignore. The first warning means that the server is missing files for running ssl, a necessary module for encrypted HTTPS. The second warning means that the AOLserver control panel, a special module for administering AOLserver, could not be loaded. If you're interested in configuring and using either of these modules, please see the AOLserver documentation.

  Warning: nsd.tcl: nsssl not loaded -- key/cert files do not exist.
  Warning: nsd.tcl: nscp not loaded -- user/password is not set. 
        

• Test to see if AOLserver is working by starting Netscape or Lynx, and surfing over to your web page:

  $ lynx localhost:8000
        

  You should see a Welcome to AOLserver page. If this doesn't work, try going to http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

• Shutdown the test server:

  $ killall nsd
        

  The killall command will kill all processes with the name nsd, but clearly this is not a good tool to use for managing your services in general. We cover this topic in the ACS documentation.

On to installing the ArsDigita Community System!

Troubleshooting the AOLserver Install

If you can't view the welcome page, it's likely there's a problem with your server configuration. Start by viewing your AOLserver log, which is in /usr/local/aolserver/log/server.log. You should also try to find lines of the form:

[01/Jun/2000:12:11:20][5914.2051][-nssock-] Notice: nssock: listening on http://localhost.localdomain:8000 (127.0.0.1:8000)
[01/Jun/2000:12:11:20][5914.2051][-nssock-] Notice: accepting connections

If you can find these lines, try entering the URL the server is listening on. If you cannot find these lines, there must be an error somewhere in the file. Search for lines beginning with the word Error instead of Notice.

Appendix: Defaults

We used the following defaults while installing AOLserver: