Forum OpenACS Q&A: manual Installation of OpenACS confusing

Hello community,

I am trying to set a new site called "bananaworld" by following the instructions described at https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-HEAD/openacs.html

1) When I create a user as described at the "Set up a user account for each site" section and later after, try to change to the /var/lib/aolserver (after 'su - bananaworld'), I get a permission denied error:

[root root]# useradd bananaworld
[root root]# su - bananaworld
[root root]# cd /var/lib/aolserver
-bash: cd: /var/lib/aolserver: Permission denied

Q1.- Do I have to add this user to the web group? I did:
[root root]# usermod –g bananaworld –G web bananaworld

2) At the "Installation Option 2: Install from tarball" section there are some "copy+paste" lines at the end of step 1. They are different from the above shown.

I will mark those lines with "<---"

:
:
[root root]# su - service0
[service0 service0]$ cd /var/lib/aolserver
[service0 aolserver]$ tar xzf /tmp/openacs-5.1.0d2.tgz
[service0 aolserver]$ mv openacs-5.1.0d2 service0
[service0 aolserver]$ chmod -R 775 service0
[service0 aolserver]$ chown -R service0.service0 service0 <---
[service0 aolserver]$ ls -al
:
:
su - service0
cd /var/lib/aolserver
tar xzf /tmp/openacs-5.1.0d2.tgz
mv openacs-5.1.0d2 service0
chmod -R 755 service0
chgrp -R service0.service0 service0 <----
exit

Q2.- Are chgrp and chown work the same for this purpose?

3) when I do a ls -la i get the following:

drwxrwx---    3 root    web          1024 Mar 29 16:41 .
drwxr-xr-x  25 root    root        1024 Mar 29 16:24 ..
drwx------    7 bananaworld bananaworld    1024 Jan  6 14:36 service0

If I want to ls -al to display as shown:

drwxrwx---    3 root    web          1024 Mar 29 16:41 .
drwxr-xr-x  25 root    root        1024 Mar 29 16:24 ..
drwx------    7 bananaworld web    1024 Jan  6 14:36 bananaworld

Q3.- Do I have to change the previously marked line to 'chgrp -R bananaworld.web bananaworld' ?

4) I can't do "Installation Option 1" because I have no Internet access for doing a cvs but I want to use the automated installation script.

Q4.- Can I edit and run the install.tcl for an automated install?

[root root]# su - bananaworld
[bananaworld bananaworld]$ cd /var/lib/aolserver
[bananaworld aolserver]$ tar xfz /tmp/oacs-5.0.0.tar.gz
[bananaworld aolserver]$ mv oacs-5.0.0 bananaworld
[bananaworld aolserver]$ emacs bananaworld/etc/install/install.tcl
[bananaworld aolserver]$ chmod -R 755 bananaworld
[bananaworld aolserver]$ chown -R  bananaworld.web bananaworld
[bananaworld aolserver]$ exit
[root root]# sh /var/lib/aolserver/bananalib/etc/install/install.sh

Many thanks,

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Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
<blockquote>[root root]# cd /var/lib/aolserver
-bash: cd: /var/lib/aolserver: Permission denied
</blockquote>

<blockquote>Q1.- Do I have to add this user to the web group? I did:
</blockquote>

I think the best solution is to make /var/lib/aolserver 1777, meaning that anybody can create stuff in it but nobody can mess with other people's stuff.  Then each directory can be 770, which means that the owner and the group can use it but nobody else can even look in it.  Opinions?

<blockquote>- Are chgrp and chown work the same for this purpose?
</blockquote>

I think that's a typo - chown can change user and group; chgrp can only change group.  Chown is the correct one here.

<blockquote>drwx------    7 bananaworld bananaworld    1024 Jan  6 14:36 service0
</blockquote>

<blockquote>If I want to ls -al to display as shown:
</blockquote>

<blockquote>drwx------    7 bananaworld web    1024 Jan  6 14:36 bananaworld
</blockquote>

There are two differences here.  One is group ownership, which you can fix with chgrp web service0.  The other is that the name of the directory is different - is that a typo?  Otherwise just mv service0 bananaworld.

<blockquote>Q4.- Can I edit and run the install.tcl for an automated install?
</blockquote>
You can run the automated install without cvs - there's a setting in install.tcl to do that.  But then it won't create some directories for you, meaning you have to have all of that set up correctly.  It's probably easier to do a manual install than to do an automatic install without live cvs.

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Btw, so just where is the AOLserver config.tcl file in CVS now? The whole etc/ subdirectory where it was located before now seems to be gone.
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Doh! Thanks Joel, you are correct. (I was looking in the wrong CVS checkout and managed to confuse myself.)