LISTSERV 17.0 Install Manual for Unix

1. Copy the ‘wa’ executable from your source scratch directory to the CGI script directory for your web server. You can call it something else, but a short name will help keep the HTML documents small! Note that you need to make ‘wa’ run suid listserv in order to allow it to access LISTSERV archive files (the correct permissions for ‘wa’ MUST be 4755 and it should be owned by ‘listserv’).  (See above for instructions on how to do this automatically at install time.)

2. If your system is running SELinux, you will likely as not have to tell it to allow CGI to run.  To determine whether or not the feature is enabled, issue the following command at a unix command prompt:
   
   getsebool httpd_enable_cgi
   
   If the response is “httpd_enable_cgi --> off”, you will have to turn it on by issuing the command
   
   setsebool -P httpd_enable_cgi=1
   
   and you can run the getsebool command again to see if it succeeded.  If it did, the response will be “httpd_enable_cgi --> on”.

3. Create a subdirectory on your web server to contain the various files LISTSERV will be creating. You should not use your main directory as LISTSERV will create quite a few files! The suggested name is ‘archives’. This directory must be rwx accessible by the ‘listserv’ user.
   
   You must also create a subdirectory under the ‘archives’ directory called ‘upload’, again, rwx accessible by the ‘listserv’ user. LISTSERV and WA use this directory for virus scanning, among other things. If this directory is not created, or is not created with the proper permissions, the posting section of the interface will not work.  

4. Create a world-readable file called /etc/lsv-wa.config with the following two statements:
   
   PATH xxx
   URL yyy
   
   where ‘xxx’ is the absolute path to the directory you’ve just created and ‘yyy’ is the URL to this directory (preferably relative).  For instance:
   
   PATH /usr/local/etc/httpd/htdocs/archives
   URL /archives
5. Modify LISTSERV’s configuration (go.user) file to add two variables, as follows:

• WWW_ARCHIVE_CGI is the relative URL that leads to the CGI script you have just installed. Typically this will be something like ‘/cgi-bin/wa’ or ‘/scripts/wa’. This is a URL, not an OS path name.
• WWW_ARCHIVE_DIR is the full path name to the directory you created in step 4.
• Under unix, don’t forget to export! Add
  
    export WWW_ARCHIVE_CGI
    export WWW_ARCHIVE_DIR
  
  at the end of your go.user file before you save it.

6. For each list that you want accessible through the web interface, you must create a subdirectory in the directory you created in step 4, named like the list. For instance, if you create ‘archives/xyz-l’, the list XYZ-L will be accessible through the interface. Note that only lists with public archives are ever made accessible, for security reasons.

7. Finally, restart LISTSERV. It should create a file accessible with the URL http://localhost/archives/index.html, and from there you should be able to access all the postings.

Complete information on installing the Web Archive Interface is contained in the Site Manager’s Operations Manual.