Installing Caucus 4.4 on Unix Revised 30 October 2002

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 caucus44.tar.gz. 
   1. Before you begin
   2. Create the Caucus Userid
   3. Installation Procedure
   4. Starting the Caucus daemon

3. Configuring your Web Server
   
   • General Server Configuration
   • Apache server Instructions
   • iPlanet 4.x+ Server Instructions
   • iPlanet 6.x+ Server Instructions

4. Accessing Caucus
   There are two different ways to enter Caucus, depending upon which user authorization method you prefer.  (Both methods are installed, and will work simultaneously, side-by-side.)

   The first (and recommended) method uses browser session cookies to handle user authorization.  It is the most flexible method, and supports authorization against an LDAP database if desired.  The installation procedure creates a standard HTML entry page, using this method, at:

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

   where yourhost.com and caucus are the hostname and Caucus userid. 

   The second method uses webserver-based access authorization, in which the webserver software actually does the work of authorizing users.  This was the default method for Caucus prior to version 4.4.  The installation procedure creates an HTML page that uses this method, at:

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

   These files are located in the public_html directory of the "caucus" userid.  They are just templates for accessing Caucus.  If your organization already has a set of web pages, you will probably want to integrate one or more of these files into your existing pages.  You might choose to copy the links in the files to the appropriate places on your existing web pages; or you might decide to edit the files directly and simply make them 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, enter 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 4.4 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.