Requirements And Installation

Submit Password Manager

The File Submission System
	Configuration Script

The submit system depends on number of configuration variables to adapt it to the host system and site preferences. Those needed for installation and are defined in the Makefile, and the rest in the run-time configuration file, submit.conf. The submit system is distributed with a configuration script setup.pl that examines your system and adjusts these files to reflect its findings. The modified Makefile is used to install the submit system, and the modified submit.conf is one of the files installed.

Setup.pl inspects your system, then writes a modified Makefile and submit.conf, retaining the original files adding the extension .BAK. Setup.pl adjusts variables which describe the host, but not those which are simple preference. These you must adjust by hand. See the configuration variables page for a complete list.

The usual operation is to perform the inspection and write the modified files without any interaction. If something cannot be discovered, the script writes an error and stops without updating the configuration. This behavior can be modified by the following options:

-i

Operate in interactive mode. This will do the usual system inspection, then ask about the values found. For each one, it gives a description of the variable, then allows you to retain or modify the value. You can also enter values which the inspection could not find.

-noscan

Do not scan the system. Instead, just use some guesses, which essentially reflect the author's system.

-f

Do not scan the system, instead read the values from the configuration files. This is useful with -i when you want to start with your last try and change some values.

-force

Ignore most errors. In this mode, the system inspection will gladly make rather wild guesses when it cannot figure something out.

-a file

The system inspection makes use of the Apache configuration file if it can find one. This flag lets you specify its location, which is helpful when the script cannot find it.

-stem [ path ]

Specify the default value for the STEM variable. STEM is used at the front of other installation paths. If the -stem option is not used, the default value of STEM is /usr/local; if -stem is used with path is omitted, STEM defaults to the empty string. The -stem option is most useful when running non-interactively; when -i is in force, the program will confirm the STEM value anyway.

-h

Print help text and exit.

Inspection

The system inspection does the following:

• Search for executables named perl, tar, and zip on the path from the PATH environment variable.

• Choose a location for man pages. It selects either /usr/share/man, /usr/man, /usr/local/share/man, or /usr/local/man based on what directories exist and whether the default STEM value contains the substring local.

• Look for a file httpd.conf in a list of directories. If found, we assume it is an Apache configuration file, and scan it for some values we're interested in. If the -a option was given, we skip the search and read the specified file. We remember whatever is found (or not found) and proceed as follows.

• We determine the user of the web server process. If we found an Apache User directive, we use that value. Otherwise, we check the /etc/passwd file against a list of likely names.

• Likewise, we determine the group of the server process from the Apache Group directive, if found. If not, we look up the group field from the entry in /etc/passwd for the user we selected in the last step.

• Look for a location for the CGI scripts. If we found a ScriptAlias in the Apache configuration, we use that directory. Otherwise, we look for a directory cgi-bin in a likely place.

• Next we find a location to put images to make them available on the web. If we found an Apache Alias directive for icons, we use that. Otherwise, if we found the DocumentRoot from Apache we use that. Otherwise, we look for a directory html in a list of likely places.

• We check /etc/login.defs to find values for the limits UID_MIN and UID_MAX which define the limits of user accounts. If this file is not found, or does not contain these parameters, the values are left undefined.

• We attempt to connect to the https port on localhost, then just close the connection. If the connection succeeds, we configure HTTPS for logins. The other HTTPS flags are always cleared.

It is worth noting that the Apache configuration scanner is by no means an accurate parser of the configuration file syntax. It can miss things that are perfectly correct but not straightforward.