2 ----------------------------------------------------------------
4 Here is a short installation-howto of Mir.
9 - tomcat 4.0.3 or above (3.3 works too as of 04.04.2002, but this could change)
10 tomcat is available from http://jakarta.apache.org
11 - apache with mod_jk.so
13 - ant (a java-based make)
14 - jaxp-1.1 (a SAX 2.0 compliant XML parser, comes with ant >= 1.4)
15 - the JAI image framework (Java Advanced Imaging) versin 1.1.1 . get it from
16 java.sun.com. ** NOTE: because JAI uses a native acceration library (a .so)
17 it must be placed in tomcat's "lib" (i.e $CATALINA_HOME/lib) directory and
18 not under the default webapps/Mir/WEB-INF/lib directory **
24 cvs -d :pserver: cvsanon@brazil.indymedia.de:/var/cvs login
29 cvs -d :pserver: cvsanon@brazil.indymedia.de:/var/cvs co mir
32 2. customize the config:
35 cp config.properties-dist config.properties
37 now customize config.properties for your needs.
40 3. configure the build.xml file if neccessary
42 cp build.xml-new build.xml
45 4. configure the perms.sh file if neccessary -- IMPORTANT! READ THIS!
46 We provide a script that sets all files' and direcories' permissions to
47 a quite reasonable state. This script gets automagically called by
48 ant after compilationl. The most important thing you have to do after
49 compiling Mir is to ensure that the log files -- especially
50 dbentity.log -- are not readable by users that could compromise
51 system security, because all passwords and the like will be logged here.
53 cp perms.sh-dist perms.sh
55 Now, change the install directory and group in perms.sh
60 5. copy the mir/templates-dist-directory to mir/templates
64 Do this as root so the permissions script is able to set
65 the permissions and owners correctly.
70 7. Link in the webapps directory of tomcat to the install directory (the
71 directory is called "Mir" and is located in the same directory in which
72 you installed the "mir" directory).
73 cd /path/to/tomcat/webapps (tomcat-4.0.x/webapps)
74 ln -s Mir-install-dir Mir
76 with tomcat 4.0.x, you could dynamically reload and stop the Mir webapp without
77 restarting tomcat by using the "Manager App" with the following url:
79 http://localhost:8080/manager/stop?path=/mir
81 This is practical if you are running several installations of mir on one
82 tomcat or other webapps and can't afford to shutdown all of them.
83 See the tomcat documentation to learn how to enable and use the manager app.
85 8. Copy any dynamic library files ending with ".so" in the WEB-INF/lib to your
86 jre/lib directory (where the other ".so" files live). Or, you can skip the
87 whole thing and live without "native" acceleration for image manupulation.
89 A painful alternative, would be to modify the tomcat startup script and add an
90 LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable that points to the WEB-INF/lib directory of your Mir
91 install dir. (called "Mir"). Add something like the following at the top of
92 startup.sh (startup.sh is found in the "bin/" dir. under $TOMCAT_HOME):
93 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/Mir-install-dir/WEB-INF/lib
95 9a. create a new database
96 The database name should be the same as in config.properties. Please look at
97 the section "Database.*" to look up the names or change them to your needs.
99 It is wise in terms of system seurity to use an unprivileged user for this
100 task instead of the superuser. This is because if Mir uses the superuser to
101 connect to the database and anybody manages to find out the password Mir
102 uses to connect, the attacker can take over the complete database. So, in
103 the following examples, we assume that the database name is "Mir", the
104 database user will be "mir" and the password is "joshua". Please note that
105 this particular password is far from being a good one. Watch "Wargames" for
108 To access the database as the database superuser, you either have to log in
109 as postgres on Unix level (which we don't recommend because you will need
110 another user to have a login shell and a password which makes system
111 penetration more likely) or you have to tell PostgreSQL with each
112 application call that you want to connect as a specific user. If you access
113 the database from any other user's account, use the -U flag to connect to
114 PostgreSQL as the database superuser ("postgres"):
116 createdb -U postgres --encoding=unicode Mir
118 Please note that if you create the database from inside the psql application,
119 the database name will likely be converted to lowercase letters.
122 9b. create an unprivileged database user for Mir
123 First, connect to the database as the database's superuser.
127 Now we create the actual user. Please choose a password that is hard to
128 guess instead of "joshua". Good passwords have characters and numerals in
129 it, have no link to its owner (like being her birthday, age, name of her
130 husband, dog, child, car, favourite beer brand). A good password looks like
133 CREATE USER Mir WITH PASSWORD 'joshua' NOCREATEDB NOCREATEUSER;
136 9c. create base table
137 Please note that we use the superuser "postgres" to connect to the "Mir"
138 database, /not/ the user "mir".
140 psql -Upostgres -f dbscripts/create_pg.sql Mir
141 for i in dbscripts/help*.sql ; do psql -Upostgres -f $i Mir ; done
142 for i in dbscripts/populate*.sql ; do psql -Upostgres -f $i Mir ; done
145 9d. Apply neccessary changes to config.properties
147 Please open config.properties and look for the lines that begin with
148 "Database.". The interesting properties are "Username", "Password", "Host"
149 and "Name". Change these properties so that they reflect the settings you
150 used to create the database and the user.
152 You should make sure that no copy of config.properties (neither in mir nor
153 in Mir/src nor in Mir/WEB-INF/classes nor in the directory tree you compiled
154 Mir from) is world-readable. Else you wouldn't have to install a password,
157 9e. Tweak mime-type extensions mappings in etc/web.xml file.
159 *** Note the defaults should be o.k for most installations ***
161 Add or remove any mime types you wish to support. This is used to figure
162 out the mime-type when (broken browsers?) browsers don't send the mime-type
163 in the content-type header field when uploading a media file. Note add the
164 moment you still have to add these to the media_type SQL table as well which
165 maps the mime-types to the correct mediaHandler class. See the comments in
166 the MirMedia class in javadoc for more details.
168 9f. Setup PostgreSQL so that all connections have to pass a password
170 In /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf you should make sure that nobody can
171 use the database without a password:
174 host all 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 password
175 host all 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 reject
177 This means: All local connections (i.e. psql without "-h hostname" option)
178 have to authenticate themselves with a password. All connections from
179 localhost (127.0.0.1) have to supply a password, too. All other connections
180 are rejected. This line doen't have to be there if you have a properly
181 configured firewall but even if you do have one, it adds to the security in
182 case an attacker penetrates the firewall by some hack.
184 If you can't access PostgreSQL after this for any reason, try and change
185 "password" in /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf to "trust". This should disable
186 any authentication method and make the database accessible again. Please use
187 this setting only temporarily because anybody who can access the PostgreSQL
188 server could take over the database completely this way. After you fixed
189 your password setting, switch the setting back to "password".
190 You may want to change your PostgreSQL password from time to time to make
191 database takeover harder. Rememer: Security is a process.
195 10. Add the dupe prevention trigger to the database:
196 cd dbscripts/dupetrigger
198 There, read INSTALL and follow the instructions.
205 insert the following patch into /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Edit the directories
209 JkWorkersFile /path/to/tomcat/conf/workers.properties
210 Include /path/to/tomcat/conf/mod_jk.conf-auto
213 Do not put any JkMount lines into your httpd.conf!
215 If mod_jk.conf-auto doesn't get written or is 0 bytes in size, check your
216 system for file ownership/permissions problems.
222 * set the document root to the same directory as in the mir config file
223 * enable shtml includes:
224 - add LoadModule includes_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_include.so
225 - make sure your directory contains "Options Includes"
230 now the admin-application is accesable via:
234 and the openposting-servlet via
238 standard login is redaktion/indymedia
243 The Mir code offers no internal search facilities, rather, the design
244 expects the use of an external program to crawl and index the static
245 site. One (recommended) tool for doing this is htdig
246 (http://htdig.org), which generates static databases of the site
247 content and then accesses those databases through a very fast CGI
248 program written in C. In the scripts directory, a perl CGI script
249 which wraps calls to htsearch is provided (scripts/search.pl) which
250 will allow searching based off of media type. (This is possible
251 because the standard templates will include META keywords like
252 hasAudio, hasVideo, etc.)
257 You can give these a try if anything goes wrong:
259 + Restart Tomcat. Especially after compiling the sources Tomcat has to be
262 + Check file permissions and ownership. Try and run perms.sh.
264 ----------------------------------------------------------------
266 2001, 2002 - the Mir coders