Forum OpenACS Q&A: Does AOLserver 3.0 require .tcl style startup file?

Question 1: I downloaded and installed the latest beta3 ACS/pg, and installed it into AOLserver 3.0. I got too many errors to make it useable, and when I started looking at them they seemed to be caused by missing values in the configuration file. I was using the /parameters/ad.ini file at first, but then decided to edit the ad.tcl file only to find it was identical to the ad.ini file. Should I be running this through Rob's conversion utility before using it?

Question 2: How do I run 2 ACS installations on the same computer? Do I need to startup two postmasters with different data directories, or do I need to put both databases in the same place?

Actually I have the ACS installed and "working", so AOLserver is talking to postgreSQL (main,subquery,log) and Interbase with no problem. The problem seems to come in when AOLserver needs a value which is set in parameters/ad.ini. If the .ini file has, for instance EnabledP=1, and some tcl code asks if {[ad_parameter EnabledP sectionname]} ..., I get an error like 'expected boolean but got "" '. So I must be making a basic mistake here (Do I have AuxConfigDir set correctly? Does the file need to be in .tcl format?).

Well I think I figured out what I did wrong. I did have the AuxConfigDir parameter set correctly, but I put it in the wrong section. I edited the basic nsd.tcl file, and the AOLserver team had a comment "Server Parameters", with the section "ns/server/${servername}" under that. In my haste I added the AuxConfigDir to this section instead of adding it to the "ns/parameters" section. Now I'm suprised that the ACS ran so well without sourcing this file! That solved, can anyone answer my second question: How to set up the data sources for two ACS/pgs on one computer?

If you're using .ini format, just plop AuxConfigDir in your ns/parameters section and make sure you have the ACS .ini file in that parameter directory. In that ACS .ini file, you need to make sure to change "yourservername" to whatever your server name actually is.

If you're using .tcl format all the way, which I recommend as it is much more flexible in the long run, you need to use the ad.tcl ACS parameter file. Also, AuxConfigDir will *not* work in your main parameter file. Instead, you'll need to explicitly source the other Tcl file by adding this line at the end of your main param file:

source /web/yourserver/parameters/yourserver.tcl

foreach tcl_file [glob /web/yourserver/parameters/*.tcl] {
	source $tcl_file
}

After reporting success in moving the AuxConfigDir parameter to another section, I discovered what is reported above: that AOLserver only reads .ini style files from that directory. Since I had already converted this to a .tcl file, I went to bed hoping the inevitable "this is the way it is done" responses would appear. Thanks!

For those who have not tracked down Rob Mayoff's superior ini2tcl conversion utility, here is the link to his AOLserver Modules page: http://dqd.com/~mayoff/aolserver/.