General Web Server Configuration on NT

This section describes, in the abstract, the changes that must be made to your web server configuration to make it work properly with Caucus. 

If you have one of the web servers listed on the installation page, you can skip directly to the page for that web server.

Otherwise, read this section to understand the kinds of things you need to change or configure, and then apply that to your own web server.

  1. Define public_html mapping

    Your web server must map the URL http://yourhost.com/~caucus into the directory c:\caucus\public_html.  This is where some HTML pages, and the images used by Caucus, live.  (As usual, you must replace c:\caucus with the actual path of the Caucus home directory.)

  2. Define CGI directory

    Caucus uses some CGI programs in the directory c:\caucus\SWEB to communicate with the web server.  The best way to identify these programs to the web server is to declare SWEB as a CGI directory.

    Specifically, declare the following mapping of a URL to a CGI directory:

    http://yourhost.com/sweb/   to   c:\caucus\SWEB\

    If for some reason you cannot declare a CGI directory, enable your server in some other way to treat the files:

    d:\caucus\SWEB\swebsock.exe
    d:\caucus\SWEB\start.exe

    as a CGI program.

    (Note: in all of the above, replace c:\caucus with the full pathname of the Caucus home directory.)

  3. Define special "/caucus" URL

    Caucus users who have already registered a userid may go directly to specific conferences, items, or responses through the special URLs shown below:

    http://yourhost.com/caucus ("Caucus Center" page) http://yourhost.com/caucus/conference_name (conference home page) http://yourhost.com/caucus/conference_name/item (go to that item) http://yourhost.com/caucus/conference_name/item/response (go to that response)

    In order to make these special URLs work, the web server must be configured to map URLs that begin "http://yourhost.com/caucus" to the CGI file c:\caucus\SWEB\start.exe.  (This may not be possible for all sweb servers. Users of such servers can still access Caucus through the regular caucus.html page.)

  4. Restrict Access with userids and passwords

    Caucus' security requires that each user be identified by a unique userid and password.  Caucus uses the standard web "access authorization" protocol to implement userid and password checking.

    To enable access authorization for Caucus, you must declare that the directory c:\caucus\SWEB is protected by a userid and password database file.  The implementation of this varies enormously across the different NT web servers; check your web server's documentation for details.