Installing Caucus 4.x on Unix

This guide describes the details involved in downloading and installing Caucus on your Unix system.  If you run into a problem or question not covered in this page, please join our support conferences (from the home page).

1. System requirements to install Caucus.

2. Installing your Caucus kit.

   Your Caucus kit is downloaded as an compressed "tar" archive called caucus43.tar.gz. 

   1. Before you begin
   2. Create the Caucus
   3. Install MySQL (Optional)
   4. Installation Procedure
   5. Starting the Caucus daemon

3. Configuring your Web Server
   • General Server Configuration
   • Apache server Instructions
   • iPlanet 4.x+ Server Instructions

4. Accessing Caucus

   The installation procedure creates a standard HTML page that you can use to access Caucus.  The URL for that page is:

   http://yourhost.com/~caucus/caucus.html

   where yourhost.com and caucus are the hostname and Caucus userid.  (If you are upgrading, this file may be called caucus42.html.)

   This file is located in the public_html directory of the "caucus" userid.  It is just a template for accessing Caucus.  If your organization already has a set of web pages, you will probably want to integrate this file with your existing pages.  You might choose to copy the links in this file to the appropriate places on your existing web pages; or you might decide to edit the caucus.html file and simply make it look more like your other web pages.

5. Managing Caucus

   During the installation procedure, you were asked for the userid (in Caucus) of the "primary manager".  That person is given full management capabilities of your Caucus site, including the ability to add other people as managers.

   To see the management capabilities, access Caucus with that userid, and on the "Caucus Center" page, click on "You can manage this site" (underneath your name near the top right corner of your browser window).

   If for some reason you need to change the userid of the primary manager, edit the plain text file MISC/managers (from the Caucus home directory), and change the userid in the very first line of that file.

6. E-mail Notification

   Caucus includes an "e-mail notification" feature that provides a powerful way to send e-mail notices of new activity in your conferences.  This feature requires some initial configuration; see the E-mail Notification Configuration page for more information.