General Unix Web Server Configuration
(Last revised 18 Dec 2000)

This section describes, in the abstract, the changes that must be made to your web server configuration to make it work properly with Caucus.  Subsequent sections describe the precise details of these changes for the servers listed above.

Read this section to learn what you need to change; then skip to the section for your web server to learn how to make those changes.

1. Allow Access to Caucus directories

   Some web servers specifically require that you "open up" access to any specific directories that live outside the "root" directory of the web tree.  In particular, you may need to allow access to the directories

   /home/caucus/SWEB
   /home/caucus/REG

   where /home/caucus is the Caucus home directory.

2. Define CGI directories

   Caucus uses several different CGI programs in the directories SWEB and REG to communicate with the web server.  The best way to identify these programs to the web server is to declare SWEB and REG as CGI directories.

   Specifically, declare the following mappings of URLs to CGI directories:

     http://yourhost.com/sweb/ to /home/caucus/SWEB/
     http://yourhost.com/reg/  to /home/caucus/REG/
   

   where /home/caucus is the Caucus home directory and yourhost.com is the hostname (and port number, if any) of your server.

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

   • /home/caucus/SWEB/swebsock
   • /home/caucus/REG/swebsock

   as CGI programs.

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 /home/caucus/SWEB/start.cgi.  If this is not possible for your web server, your users may 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 /home/caucus/SWEB is protected by a userid and password database file.  For some web servers, this is done automatically by the Caucus installation script.  See the section for your web server to learn whether this is done automatically for the web server you are using.

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