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The first thing that I did before beginning was to set up a new user account on the target machine. I did this because I already had several ROADS installations on the same disk and wanted to clearly separate them. Maintaining several instances of ROADS on the same machine is fine provided you configure the Web server mappings correctly and ensure you use different ports for the WHOIS++ server.
(The target machine was a PC running Red Hat Linux 4.2)
I used lynx to ftp the ROADS 2.1 tar file into the home directory of the user I had set up as ROADS administrator:
$ lynx ftp://ftp.roads.lut.ac.uk/pub/ROADS/roads-v2.1.tar.Z
I then followed the instructions in the ROADS v2 manual for unpacking the zipped tar file:
zcat roads-v2.1.tar.Z | tar xvf -
All seemed to go OK apart from a 'Broken pipe' error right at the end of unpacking. I assumed all was OK and cd'd into the main roads-v2.1 directory.
Contents of roadsv-2.1 directory
The next thing I did was run 'Configure' as the new user I'd set up:
./Configure
I used the 'factory settings' and said yes at the tips prompt to set everything up as default. I called the service 'Sample Gateway' as I knew I could change this later on by editing the /roads-v2.1/lib/ROADS.pm file. I set the server handle as fish2. I chose to include the sample eLib database to help with configuration.
The next task was to map my new installation in the Web server configuration file /etc/httpd/conf/srm.conf:
ScriptAlias /sample/cgi-bin/ /home/pj/roads-v2.1/cgi-bin/
ScriptAlias /sample/admin-cgi/ /home/pj/roads-v2.1/admin-cgi/
Alias /sample/ /home/pj/roads-v2.1/htdocs/
Doh. It now occurred to me that I had forgotten to set the WHOIS++ port to a different number. To rectify this I opened up the /roads-v2.1/lib/ROADS.pm file in a text editor (ensuring that I had taken a copy of the unchanged file first) and changed the port number to 8250. I checked to ensure the server mappings in the ROADS.pm file were the same as those I had set up in my /etc/httpd/conf/srm.conf file.
Tip: If you are using a tool like NFS to view your ROADS files on a PC using Windows explorer / file manager, and a Windows based editor, ensure that you can save files in UNIX format using that editor. One such editor is PFE by Alan Phillips of Lancaster University.I could have done this by re-running configure and making the changes that way but I thought this would be quicker. As it turned out it was far slower :-).
I then restarted the Web server and tested to see if it worked. I fired up the main search page and tried a search with the term 'Internet' as I knew this would give me hits in the eLib database. I was unsurprised to get the following message however:
No matches - The database server couldn't be contacted message
I decided to try restarting the WHOIS++ server from the Web Admin. Centre interface to either fix the problem or get some more information.
Restarting the WHOIS++ server from the /admin-cgi/admincentre.pl interface
Doing this returned an error message thus:
Your WWW server doesn't have write access to:
I had come across this problem a number of times before and new it was a simple matter of changing the ownership of certain files so the the Web server 'nobody' could read and write to them. Doing a quick ls -al told me that a number of the files and sub-directories in the roads-v2.1 directory were now owned by root.
In the roads-v2.1 directory as root I changed the file ownership to nobody all levels down:
chown -R nobody *
Now I restarted the WHOIS++ server again. This time everything seemed fine so I tried my search again. Still no luck! Hmmm.. Next step was to check the WHOIS++ server was actually working so I telneted to it and typed in my search term. No problem there.
I went back to the Web search form and checked the debug option when I did my search this time. Now I saw the problem. The WHOIS++ server was being contacted on the wrong port. It was being contacted on 8247 (the default) not 8250 the port that I had chosen. I checked the /roads-v2.1/lib/ROADS.pm file, but it was fine. Next I checked the /roads-v2.1/config/databases file. That's where the problem was:
Sample Gateway:fish.ilrt.bris.ac.uk:8247::fish2
I changed the entry to 8250 and reloaded the search form in my browser. Finally it worked. I now had a mostly working ROADS installation. Now I could begin the difficult bit, turning it into a gateway.
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Last updated: January 1999 - paul.hollands@bris.ac.uk