Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Hello! New to AOLServer and OPENACS. Question...

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Yeah, there is some performance overhead to using OpenACS, but since everyone else tends to see the same overhead from the core, the experts eventually tend to beat on it until the overhead knows its place again and stays small and meak. :) Like Don improving permissions performance and scalability way back when, etc.

And actually, sometimes the worst performance problems you see are due to making silly AOLserver configuration mistakes, which can bite you whether you're using OpenACS or not. I know because I've made that mistake myself. :)

I'm not sure what you mean about your top level page problem, can you elaborate?

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Posted by Kenneth Snyder on
The top level problem is :
if the ACS root page is not in my pageroot directory(lets say pageroot is /aolserver/www), say it's somewhere else, like mydomain.com/acs (so that would make the physical directory /aolserver/www/acs), the main ACS page  will come up, but none of the links will work because they are relative pathed from aolserver's pageroot directory.
I think I just need to play with config.tcl file some more.
I'm running AOLServer 3.5.5, is the special acs version of aolserver required?

In an unrelated topic, is there an AOLServer forum or NG like this. I can find the "chat logs", but I can't seem to find any forums. I have some questions regarding AOLServer, like exactly how do I have multiple servers "virtual servers" on the same machine. So like snyderworld.org would go to one page, and snyderworld.net would go to another, even though it's going to the same physical machine. Is nsvhr required for that,  Anyhow that and a few others...most of it surely can be solved by myself with probably just some more time invested in playing, but it would be nice to save some time.
THanks for your response.
Ken

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Posted by bill kellerman on
kenneth,

aolserver's mailing  list is at http://listserv.aol.com/archives/aolserver.html (with archives).

before i started using openacs, i used aolserver 4's internet virtual hosting which worked great.

then once i started using openacs, it was much, much more simple.  define a url in your site map and use the host-node-map settings in site settings to attach a hostname to a root url.

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Ah, I see. I've never heard of anyone using OpenACS where their mysite/ URL was not the same as the OpenACS pageroot URL. So probably you're trying to do something no one ever wanted to do before. It is likely feasible, but it might mean hacking the OpenaCS request processor.

Presumably you have some legacy (before you started using OpenACS) content which you want to use as your front page? You should be able to do that regardless. I'd suggest making your AOLserver and OpenACS page roots match the way most people do and trying things a different way.

On AOLserver versions, you need 3.3+ad13 for internationalization support which OpenACS uses. There may be other little reasons why 3.3+ad13 (or soon, 4.0) is required, but I don't really remember. If you're using it already, 3.5.5 will probably work fine, until you run into some minor obscure bug. If you have problems just upgrade to AOLserver 4.0. Currently 4.0 does not have SSL support, other than that it should be ready to go for use with OpenACS.

You can join the AOLserver email list.

There is lots of AOLserver virtual server info scattered in all sorts of places. For what you want, AOLserver 4.0 is probably the simplest choice, it will let you run both snyderworld.org and snyderworld.net within a single AOLserver process.