General Unix Web Server Configuration
Revised 30 October 2002)

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 a special CGI file.  If you are using the default, "cookie" method, you should point these URLs to /home/caucus/REG/start.cgi. 

   If you are using the "old" web-server authorization method, you should point these URLs to /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.  For the "old" authorization method, Caucus uses the standard web "access authorization" protocol to implement userid and password checking.

   To enable this form of 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.

   If you are only going to use the newer "cookie" authorization method, you can skip this step.

[Continue with installation]