MIR INSTALLATION HOWTO Last updated: $Date: 2003/12/03 18:10:45 $ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a short installation-howto of Mir. prerequisites: - tomcat 4.0.4+ or 3.3 (4.0.3 and below have some bad bugs) tomcat is available from http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/ - apache 1.3.x. with mod_jk.so. As far as I can tell the connector for 2.x is still rather undocumented. http://httpd.apache.org - postgres 7.1+ - ant (a java-based make) - jaxp-1.1 (a SAX 2.0 compliant XML parser, comes with ant >= 1.4) - the JAI image framework (Java Advanced Imaging) version 1.1.2 . Get it from java.sun.com. You need both: JAI and JAI Image I/O. Install those two in the JRE running tomcat. - A good reading of Tomcat, Apache and Postgresql documentation if you are not familiar with any of them. The documentation is available at: http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/index.html, http://httpd.apache.org/docs/ and http://www.postgresql.org respectively. 1. checkout the cvs CVS LOGIN: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@mir.indymedia.org:/var/lib/cvs login password: anonymous CVS CHECKOUT: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@mir.indymedia.org:/var/lib/cvs co -r MIR_1_1 mir 2. customize the config: cd mir/etc cp config.properties-dist config.properties now customize config.properties for your needs. 3. configure the perms.sh file if neccessary -- IMPORTANT! READ THIS! We provide a script that sets all files' and direcories' permissions to a quite reasonable state. This script gets automagically called by ant after compilationl. The most important thing you have to do after compiling Mir is to ensure that the log files -- especially dbentity.log -- are not readable by users that could compromise system security, because all passwords and the like will be logged here. cp perms.sh-dist perms.sh Now, change the install directory and group in perms.sh edit perms.sh 4. There is NO step 4!! 5. compile. For this step, you have to make sure that the TOMCAT_HOME environment variable is set to the root of your tomcat installation. The build.xml compile target will give up if this is not set. Do this as root so the permissions script is able to set the permissions and owners correctly. ant 6. Link in the webapps directory of tomcat to the install directory (the directory is in mir/bin/mir (Here and in the rest of this document, we assume you called the link "Mir", but this could be named anything.) cd ${TOMCAT_HOME}/webapps ln -s /path/to/mir/bin/mir Mir with tomcat 4.0.x, you could dynamically reload and stop the Mir webapp without restarting tomcat by using the "Manager App" with the following url: http://localhost:8080/manager/stop?path=/Mir This is practical if you are running several installations of mir on one tomcat or other webapps and can't afford to shutdown all of them. See the tomcat documentation to learn how to enable and use the manager app. 7. Follow the installation instructions of JAI / JAI Image I/O. 8a. create a new database The database name should be the same as in config.properties. Please look at the section "Database.*" to look up the names or change them to your needs. It is wise in terms of system security to use an unprivileged user for this task instead of the superuser. This is because if Mir uses the superuser to connect to the database and anybody manages to find out the password Mir uses to connect, the attacker can take over the complete database. So, in the following examples, we assume that the database name is "Mir", the database user will be "joe" and the password is "joshua". Please note that this particular password is far from being a good one. Watch "Wargames" for details. =B) To access the database as the database superuser, you either have to log in as postgres on Unix level (which we don't recommend because you will need another user to have a login shell and a password which makes system penetration more likely) or you have to tell PostgreSQL with each application call that you want to connect as a specific user. In the following example we'll create the mir database as postgreSQL user "pete". cd mir/dbscripts su postgres ./createmirdb.sh mir pete joe joshua 8b. Apply neccessary changes to config.properties Please open config.properties and look for the lines that begin with "Database.". The interesting properties are "Username", "Password", "Host" and "Name". Change these properties so that they reflect the settings you used to create the database and the user. You should make sure that no copy of config.properties (neither in mir nor in Mir/src nor in Mir/WEB-INF/classes nor in the directory tree you compiled Mir from) is world-readable. Else you wouldn't have to install a password, anyway. 8c. Setup PostgreSQL so that all localhost connections have to pass a password In /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf, change the line with 127.0.0.1 as follows: host all 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 password This means: All connections from 127.0.0.1 to any database will have to authenticate themselves with a password. Please refer to the PostgreSQL documentation if you want a different authentication setup. Make sure however that mir can connect to it's database using password authentication. 9. For now, there's no step 9 either. 10. Tweak mime-type extensions mappings in etc/web.xml file. *** Note the defaults should be o.k for most installations *** Add or remove any mime types you wish to support. This is used to figure out the mime-type when (broken browsers?) browsers don't send the mime-type in the content-type header field when uploading a media file. Note add the moment you still have to add these to the media_type SQL table as well which maps the mime-types to the correct mediaHandler class. See the comments in the MirMedia class in javadoc for more details. 11. restart tomcat 12. configure mod_jk There are 2 ways to do this. auto-generation of mod_jk.conf or manula JKMount lines. (rumour has it that Tomcat 4.0.x doesn't support auto-generation, but this is unconfirmed). In both examples please note that the JkWorkersFile line only needs to appear once per Apache config. Also this assumes that your tomcat installation has it's ajp13 conenctor turned on. See tomcat's server.xml file and documentation for this. Chances are that it is turned on. Method a). The automatic mod_jk.conf method: insert the following patch into /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Edit the directories to suit your needs. JkWorkersFile /path/to/tomcat/conf/workers.properties Include /path/to/tomcat/conf/mod_jk.conf-auto Do not put any JkMount lines into your httpd.conf! If mod_jk.conf-auto doesn't get written or is 0 bytes in size, check your system for file ownership/permissions problems. Method b). Manual JKMount lines insert the following patch into /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Edit the directories to suit your needs. JkWorkersFile /path/to/tomcat/conf/workers.properties JkMount /Mir ajp13 JkMount /Mir/* ajp13 13. configure apache for the static site * Make sure that if you are using a non standard character set enconding that Apache doesn't accidentally send the wrong encoding in the HTTP headers. edit http.conf: * set the document root to the same directory as in the mir config file * enable shtml includes: - add LoadModule includes_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_include.so - make sure your directory contains "Options Includes" * Determine if you need to modify any apache mime-mappings - The web-server host must recognize the .m3u, .pls and other file extensions and send the proper "audio/x-mpegurl" and "audio/x-scpls" mime-types respectively. If the web server is apache, it's easy, just add: audio/x-mpegurl m3u audio/x-scpl pls to the file pointed to by the "TypesConfig" command in your apache config file. Or add and equivalent AddType command to your httpd.conf. Of course this assumes that the mod_mime is loaded. that's it :) now the admin-application is accesable via: http://host/Mir/servlet/Mir and the openposting-servlet via http://host/Mir/servlet/OpenMir standard login is admin/indymedia. See the webdb_users SQL table to change/add users or passwords. SEARCHING The Mir code offers no internal search facilities, rather, the design expects the use of an external program to crawl and index the static site. One (recommended) tool for doing this is htdig (http://htdig.org), which generates static databases of the site content and then accesses those databases through a very fast CGI program written in C. In the scripts directory, a perl CGI script which wraps calls to htsearch is provided (scripts/search.pl) which will allow searching based off of media type. (This is possible because the standard templates will include META keywords like hasAudio, hasVideo, etc.) UPGRADING see the UPGRADING.mir file. TROUBLESHOOTING You can give these a try if anything goes wrong: + Restart Tomcat. Especially after compiling the sources Tomcat has to be restarted. + Check file permissions and ownership. Try and run perms.sh. ---------------------------------------------------------------- $Date: 2003/12/03 18:10:45 $ - the Mir coders