[MKDoc-admin] makedoc requirements

[adam moran]

hi,

bruno answered Brian's points off-list - i am posting the relevant part 
of the reply to the list f.y.i.

---------------------------------------------

on 11-11-02 bruno wrote:

On Mon 11-Nov-2002 at 05:22:23PM -0000, Brian Diggle wrote:

 > Details of our web hosting facility can be found at
 > http://www.leeds.ac.uk/iss/bsols/webhosting/


I don't have web-access here, so I'll try and answer everything I can.


 >> 1.
 >> Can we avoid needing three domain names?
 >> The costing structure for our web hosting is based
 >> upon charges per virtual web server- your product seems
 >> to require three virtual servers


That it is us not being clear enough, the other two domains simply
service the main public domain and would not be charged for.

The reason we suggest three domains in the installation instructions is
that conceptually it is simpler to have different domains for different
tasks.  Anyone who understands a little apache configuration can put
them all on one domain if they wish - For example, the public interface
on http://www.example.com/ and the editor & admin interfaces on
https://www.example.com/.


 >> 2.
 >> Has it been tested under solaris 8?


I've installed it on solaris 8, there are a couple of things that need
to be tweaked - For instance apache/mod_perl has broken xml/expat on
solaris, so it needs to be recompiled.


 >> 3.
 >> How much technical knowledge/ unix knowledge/
 >> root intervention is needed to maintain the product


The cms system itself is entirely managed through the web interface,
it's as simple as we can possibly make it to edit and manage documents
and users.

There is no web-interface to the templating system (at the moment), so
to edit these, somebody needs access to the file-system - They don't
require root access as the templates are picked-up by the software
without restarting the server.

There are a handful cron jobs, these are not to be run as root.

MKDoc depends on a number of perl modules that should really be
installed by root.  MKDoc itself should not be installed by root.

Software upgrades require apache restarts (this is usual with a mod_perl
application).


 >> 4.
 >> Details of the installation requirements and process
 >> for the production version.


They are the same as the instructions at http://download.mkdoc.com/ any
variation will depend on the particular configuration (dns, remote
mysql, https etc..).


 >> 5. Why might MySQL's defaults be insufficient? At
 >> what hit rate does this become appropriate?


Sorry, you should ignore that, it should be removed - We've optimised
the code since that was written such that mysql is not a bottleneck.


 >> 6. Is this a suitable application for a shared hosting
 >> server or would you recommend a dedicated server?


We have it running in both situations.  MKDoc heavily uses unicode so it
is sensitive to the version of perl; on solaris, apache needs to be
custom compiled, so admins need to be aware of these things before they
upgrade the system.  On a shared box, I would recommend compiling a
separate apache and binding it to a different ip-address.


 >> 7. What directives does the include httpd.conf have?
 >>    Is this the same for the production version?


I'm not sure what you are asking here.  I'll give you a random sample:

      Setenv LANG "en_GB.UTF-8"
      PerlSetEnv PERL5LIB /export/live/www/centres/mkdoc
      SetHandler perl-script
      PerlHandler Apache::Registry
      PerlSendHeader On
      Options ExecCGI
      AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
      order allow,deny
      allow from all
      AllowOverride none

Hope this helps, if you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

-- 
Bruno