Installation Procedure

The software installation procedure is the same whether you are:

• installing Caucus for the first time
• upgrading your existing Caucus software

The installation procedure automatically determines if this is a new installation of Caucus or an upgrade to an existing Caucus site.  If you are upgrading Caucus, your existing conferences will not be affected by the upgrade.  (This includes upgrading from a Caucus Trial Kit.)

1. Login to the Caucus userid.

   Unless otherwise stated, all commands in this installation guide must be typed while logged in to your unix system, in a terminal window, as "caucus".

2. Unpackage the software

   The Caucus software is delivered in a file called caucus44.tar.gz.  In the Caucus home directory, type the following commands to unpackage this file.

        gunzip  caucus44.tar.gz
        tar xvf caucus44.tar
   

3. Run the installation script

   The software includes an installation script that will automatically create the proper script files, set the proper file permissions, and so on.

   The script will ask for your activation key, the hostname (and port number, if needed) of your web server, and some other information.  If you do not have an activation key, contact support@caucuscare.com.

   To run the script, type:

       ./cinstall
   

4. Check for swebd.conf.new

   If you are installing Caucus as an upgrade, look for the files SWEB/swebd.conf and SWEB/swebd.conf.new.  Compare the two files with 'diff' or merge2.  Swebd.conf.new is the new version created by the installer; if you've made any significant changes to swebd.conf, you should now make the same changes to swebd.conf.new.

   Then, in either case, rename swebd.conf.new to swebd.conf.

5. Check hostname and port number

   When you ran the cinstall script, it asked for a hostname and port number (such as "www.xyz.com" or "host.mycompany.com:8001").  If you need to change this information, now or at any future time, edit the files listed below, and change the hostname or port number appropriately.

   • SWEB/swebd.conf
   • SWEB/start.cgi
   • public_html/caucus.html
     

6. Public HTML directory

   Caucus requires that certain files be placed in the Caucus userid's public HTML directory.  The standard name for this directory is public_html.  The Caucus distribution includes a public_html directory with the necessary files already in it.  If your httpd server uses a different name, rename public_html to that directory name now.

   For example, if your httpd server uses "WWW" as a user's public HTML directory, from the Caucus home directory type:

        mv public_html WWW
   

   You may also need to change the definition of the Caucus parameter "Caucus_Lib".  See your SWEB/swebd.conf configuration file for details.

7. Text Interface

   In addition to the Web interface, there is a (largely historical) text interface to Caucus.  If for some reason you wish to use this text interface, see the files cv2 and cv2check.  Cv2 is the script used to run the text interface to Caucus.  Cv2check provides a quick summary of how much new information there is in the conferences that you belong to.

   If you have purchased the unlimited text-interface license option for Caucus, and are providing access to the text interface to your users, you probably want to copy these scripts to a public directory, such as /usr/local or /usr/local/bin.  You may also wish to rename the scripts to something more mnemonic, perhaps caucus and caucuscheck.

[Continue with installation]