INSTALL

If you haven't read the README yet, you are advised to do so now before continuing reading this document.

You can read this document also via 'perldoc INSTALL', this gets rid of the funny =something lines ;)

More help is available for example via perldoc doc/Dicop.pod, perldoc doc/Server.pod and perldoc doc/Client.pod.

Prerequisites

You need the package Dicop-Base installed at your system before you can proceed. If you haven't already, update it to the last available version you can find at out pages at http://www.bsi.bund.de/.

First step: Take you pick

First, there are two things to consider:

What you want to install

You can install the server, or the client, or both. Typically, you install the server on one computer, and the client on many others. We suggest you start by installing the server on one computer, and then test it with the client from the same computer. Once this works, install the client to different machines.

How do you want to install it

There are is only one way for the server, but two ways for the client to be installed.

The server side uses the daemon dicopd. The cgi-bin script called server running under Apache is no longer available.

The client can be installed so that it is mounted from the server or so that the client copy is locally. We recommend to have a local copy of the client instead of mounting a directory over NFS or Samba.

To achive that the local client copy is always update, you can use a wrapper script that downloads the client, unwraps it and runs it. An example is given below. To update the clients is simple a matter of preparing a new client .tar.gz file and then requiring a higher client build number at the server.

Unpacking

When using 'dicopd', you can unpack the tarball to any directory you like and you do not need a running Apache (except as acting as a file server to serve workers and target files to the clients, but the file server can be located at a different machine).

After downloading, unzip and untar with:

        tar -xzf Dicop-Server-3.00_86.tar.gz

Replace "3.00_86" with the actual version you got.

The server part (e.g. the dicopd daemon) is supposed to run under some sort of Linux, Solaris, or Mac OS X. Windows or Cygwin are currently not supported.

After untaring/unzipping it, you need first to verify the package, then to build a Makefile, then run "make" to create all the neccessary files and then run the testsuite to make sure it really works on your system.

Actually "installing" is not neccessary, you can run the dicopd directly from the build directory.

Verify the signature

Use gpg to verify the signature, if you haven't already. Download our key from our website http://www.bsi.bund.de/produkte/dicop/, import it and then do:

        gpg Dicop-Server-3.00_86.tar.gz.asc

Replace 3.00_86 with the actual version you got.

If the signature does not verify ok, please notify us immidiately. DO NOT run perl Makefile.PL or anything else nor install the package when the signature cannot be verified ok. Your system might get compromised!.

If the signature was okay, proceed.

Creating the Makefile

Remember to install Dicop::Base before proceeding further!

Change to the directory where you unpacked the tarfile and type

        perl Makefile.PL

This will tell you about missing modules. Download and install them and then retry this step until it finished without warnings. See the next heading for how to find and download modules.

The warnings you might encounter are:

        Warning: prerequisite Bar::Baz failed to load
        Warning: prerequisite Bar::Baz vx.yz not found

or similiar things. The first tells you that the module was not found at all, the second tells you that you do have an older version only and need to install a sufficient new version.

There are some problem with older versions of Math::BigInt (prior to v1.49), so make sure you get the latest.

After this step, you can retry the

        perl Makefile.PL

in the dicop build directory and it should print out no more warnings.

Where to find missing modules

If some modules are missing in your Perl installation, then you need to get and install them. You can download modules from CPAN http://search.cpan.org/ or http://www.cpan.org/.

Install the modules via the same commands for each of them:

        perl Makefile.PL
        make test
        make install

Some modules depend on others, you must resolve these dependencies by installing in the right order.

You can check whether a particulary module is installed and which version it has by doing (example for Digest::MD5):

        perl -MDigest::MD5\ 99

It either prints the currently installed version or failes with something like 'module not found'.

Under Windows, ActiveState Perl (we tested with build 617, but newer versions should be fine) already contains most of the modules, it at least contains all modules the client will need. The server is not supported under Windows.

The client needs fewer modules, and it should work fine under Windows.

You will also need a make program. Under Linux onboard, under a different OS you might need to install one along with a compiler.

Running the testsuite

When writing the makefile finally went okay, follow with:

        make
        make test

If some tests fail, please email the output to us.

When all tests pass, you COULD theoretical type (as root):

        make install

but we do NOT recommend this. It is not neccessary to do make install to run dicopd, nor client! make install would install some Perl modules into your Perl's site-perl tree. But it is much easier to have them all in one place together with the data files for upgrading etc.

After build

You need to renaming a couple of files and adjust some things to meet your needs before starting dicopd for the first time:

The best way to setup all the neccessary files and permissons is to run

        ./setup

and follow the instructions.

Here is a step-by-step overview on what you might need to do in addition (or instead of) to running ./setup:

config

Look into config and copy the server.cfg.sample file to server.cfg and then edit it to match your configuration.

Do this only if you are installing the cluster for the first time. If you already have an older version installed, have a look into the sample configuration files to see if anything has changed, and then take over possible changes into your own config files.

You very probably need to change port, hostname and mailserver and some other settings like user/group.

Creating user/group

When not using dicopd, you must make sure that the user and group specified in server.cfg actually exist. You can create them on most systems with a command similiar to this:

        groupadd GROUP
        useradd -g GROUP USER

Replace GROUP by the name of the group (f.i. 'dicop') and USER with the user name (f.i. 'dicop', too).

Mail templates

Go to the tpl/mail/ directory and copy the files from filename.txt.sample to filename.txt and edit them. You also need to do this only when you are installing a fresh server, not when you upgrade.

Event templates

Go to the tpl/event/ directory and copy the files from filename.txt.sample to filename.txt and edit them. You also need to do this only when you are installing a fresh server, not when you upgrade.

Permissions

You also need to adjust the permissions of the directories/files to match the group and user. Create a new user and group that match the user and group name you specified in server.cfg and then set the correct file ownership for all files including the parent directory. So make sure that the directory containing the server is also read/writable for the user you want dicopd to run under. For instance, if you untarred Dicop-Server-3.00 into /home/dicop/, then do (assuming your user and group are called 'dicop', otherwise replace dicop.dicop with the user.group you want to use):

        chown -R dicop.dicop /home/dicop/Dicop-Server-3.00/  

Test data

In the additional tar file name Dicop-Data.tar.gz are some test-jobs and other usefull test data. Untar it into the data directory so that data/jobs.lst etc exist. Then go and play a bit with it. Most things except actually submitting a change form (e.g. adding, viewing and getting a change form) should work. If not, please let us now so that we can fix it.

Adding an admin

You need at least one administrator before you can start ./dicopd. If you haven't run ./setup nor defined any administrators before, run

        ./adduser.pl

and follow the instructions.

Administration and further testing

You need to start dicopd as root from a console with one of the following two ways:

        ./dicopd
        ./dicopd 2>>stderr.log &

The first variant enables you to see eventual error messages, the second one puts it into the background. If you experience troubles, check also the log files in logs/error.log for error messages.

You should do this as root, since the deamon needs to switch itself shortly after the start to the actual user/group specified in the config file!

Beware that closing a SSH or telnet session from where you started it by simple killing the X-window might kill the background process, too! Logout before closing the session seems to work around this problem.

Please note that the startup can take quite some time, especially if there is a lot of data and you have a slow server machine. You can use top to check whether the process still is in the startup-phase, it will typically use 100% CPU power then. However, with the test-data a 200 Mhz K6 should not take more than a few seconds to startup. On a current machine (e.g. more than a one Ghz) the startup is more or less instant.

You can then connect to the running daemon with your favourite broswer via:

        http://host:port/

for instance

        http://127.0.0.1:8888/

if your web browser runs on the same machine than the dicopd deamon.

If the connect fails, the server might not have finished it's startup yet.

The server is writing out it's data from time to time to disk. To shut it down, just issue a kill command on the console:

        killall dicopd

If you want to kill it without writing it's modified data back, try this:

        killall -9 dicopd

If you did run dicopd in the foreground, pressing CTRL-C will stop it and let it write back the data to the disk.

Getting some real work done

Once you have browsed around the GUI a bit, you might want to get the cluster to do some real work.

First you need to register any possible client at the server. For this you also need a group to put the client in (do not confuse this with the users/groups for your operating system). So follow these steps:

Group

Go to Add Group and add one, or modify the already existing group.

Client

Go to Add Client and add one client, or modify an already exisiting one.

Jobtype

Go to Add Jobtype and then add one test jobtype (use the string "test" as the workername).

Job

Go to Add Job and add one test job (use the freshly added job type).

Now the server is ready to serve the work. You can view the different status pages, especially the one for the job (click onto the ID of the newly created job in the main status page to get there).

However, you will notice that nothing happens. That is right, because you didn't run any client. Remember, the server does nothing except handing out work to any registered client who requests it. So you need to run at least one client to get the work done.

Client

The client can be started via the command line.

You can either install the client on the server, and share this installation with all client machine (by network mount), or put a copy of the client onto each client machine and run it locally.

Please see /doc/client.pod for instructions on how to set up the client for multiply machines, especially diskless cluster nodes.

For testing purposes, you can run the client that is included in the server distribution, or untar/unzip the client distribution to a seperate directory.

Edit config/client.cfg to allow your client to connect to the right server.

Then start the client with the following:

        client --id=id_number -server=your-dicop-server:8888

You need to replace id_number with the actual id, that is the one the client got after you added it. Usually that would be 3, since there are already two test clients. If there are any error messages, you can get more information by restarting the client with:

        client --id=id_number --debug=nr

where nr is 1,2 or 3. See the extended client documentation in doc/Client.pod for more options.

Documentation

Please have a look into /doc, you will find there help files in pod format.

If you have any more questions, please send us an email. We accept encrypted mail, please use the key attached as dicop.asc.

AUTHOR

(c) Bundesamt fuer Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik 1998-2006

DiCoP is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

See the file LICENSE or http://www.bsi.bund.de/ for more information.

cpanm Dicop

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Dicop