Installing and Operating a VOH Site

Starting with HTML

When getting started with a Virtual Office Hours operation, the first thing that one needs to do is get a directory from which to start. This can be a directory underneath the server root, as it is with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA (the site at which this service was developed, henceforth referred to as our site), or it (the directory) can be an individual's home account (such as http://www.some.site.edu/~user/voh), an option which is particularly useful if your sysadm will give you an account just for the voh service.

At our site we are taking advantage of the fact that with most server's when a directory is requested by a browser, the file index.html is automatically accessed. This allows us to use the short and easy to remember URL: http://www.chem.ucla.edu/uclavoh Therefore our "home page" is actually called index.html.

Each of the classes that the site services is a directory of its own, and the motif of above is extended. Each class's home page is an index.html file that resides under a directory named for that class, giving, again, a fairly short, easy to remember URL.

Getting the Question Answer Stuff Running

The short list:

1. Download the scripts from the distribution area.
2. Move the scripts into the server's cgi-bin directory. Make sure that they are executable by the server.
3. Make the appropriate edits to the scripts based on the suggestions made in the comments.
4. Set up your voh.conf file. This file is the main config file and you just put one line per class (See the voh.conf instructions in the example file).
5. Set up a qa.html file and questions directory in each class's area. The qa.html file requires a <!-- begin --> line for prepending (this can be removed, but the script has to be modified). Both of these files must be editable by the owner of the server's process (which is often user=nobody group=nogroup). We do this by making both files owned by the group nogroup and giving the group write permission (775 for the directory and 664 for the qa.html file).
6. Set up the questions submission form so that it provides the proper lecture= field to the script.
7. Edit the link to the qtba.pl script on the home page for the lecture to have the proper lecture= field.

That should be it...

The long list:

Virtual Office Hours is fairly easy to install. The following steps should get you to a working site in about 15 minutes. All kinds of customization can be done, but that takes more work and is up to the user.

INSTALLING VOH

• Get the tar file. (You've already done this :))

• Untar the tar file where you want your VOH to be. This will usually be the root of your web server, but this is up to you. The command will look something like:

  tar xvf voh_1.0.tar

• Find PERL. If you don't have Perl on you system, you need to have it for VOH to work. Talk to your sysadm or go to http://www.perl.com.
  Command something like:

  whereis perl

• If you want to change the name of the site, you will need to change the /VOH directory to the new name and modify every occurrence of /VOH in the files.

  You need to mv the directory.

  mv VOH newname

  and crunch all occurrences of /VOH in the files. You have to be careful not to do this to the VOH_setup file in the perlscripts directory however. You can try something like moving VOH_setup somewhere else in the tree and then

  perl -pi -e 's#/VOH#/newname#g' */*

  I'd just use VOH for the first try...

• Edit your voh.conf file in the conf directory. Instructions for this can be found in the docs directory.

• Edit VOH_setup. The following lines need to be fixed:

  $blanks_path = "/net/etc/httpd/htdocs/VOH/blanks";
$qaarf_path ="/net/etc/httpd/htdocs/VOH/profs";
$temp_path="/net/etc/httpd/htdocs/VOH/temp";
$VOH_EMAIL="voh@u.edu";
$voh_uid = "9000";
$nogroup_gid = "65534";


  The first three refer to where the blanks, profs and temp directories are located in your tree. These could be lots of places, but I've included them in the tar so they exist and are the same. You should only need to change the part up to VOH unless you've renamed your site in step 4.

  VOH_EMAIL is the email address that will be on the bottom of all of the pages. This should be the account answered by the person responsible for fixing problems with the pages.

  voh_uid is the user id number for the account under which the pages will be edited. Some systems will want to create a special account for this, some will just use an account number. You can find this information out by looking at the password file

  cat /etc/passwd

  or by looking at files owned by the user with an ls -n.

  nogroup_gid is the group id under which the web server is running. Because the web server must create and edit files owned by you, it must have access. One way to give the server access while not giving everyone access is to make the edited files owned by the group under which the server is running, and give the group write access. This requires that you ask your sysadm to make your voh user also a member of that group so that you may actually chgrp files to this group.

  For instance. Your system is using the NCSA HTTPd web server running as user nobody and group nogroup. You can ask your system administrator to add your voh user (say vohadm) to the the nogroup group. You then can find the nogroup number in the /etc/group file (it's often 65534 or 60002). Put this number in nogroup_gid and you're ready to go.

• Execute VOH_setup passing it the voh.conf file as:

  path_to_VOH_setup/VOH_setup path_to_conf/voh.conf

  specifically from the VOH directory:

  perlscripts/VOH_setup conf/voh.conf

• You should now have a directory in temp for each class entry in your voh.conf file. Move all of your directories from temp to the top directory with:

  cd temp mv * ../

  and then move the qaarf.html and af.html files into profs

  mv qaarf.html profs mv af.html profs

• Edit the voh-lib.pl file in cgi-bin. Directions are in the file itself. For most uses you will not need to modify anything else, EXCEPT: In the qsf.pl file there is a mail command that can vary from system to system. On line 78 you will find the command:

  open(MAIL, "|/usr/bin/mailx -r $in{email} -s \"VOH Confidential Submission\" $conf[3]") || (&Failure(14));

  the /usr/bin/mailx needs to point at an appropriate mailer on your system. See the man pages to verify that the -s and -r commands send the Subject and Return address respectively. If your mailer doesn't allow these, you may have to modify the notice in the mail to indicate to the professors that they cannot simply reply to the message.

  Give it a try, it will make better sense.

• After you've edited the files in the cgi-bin directory you will need to copy them into the script directory of your web server. In some installations you will need to have your system administrator do this for you. Make sure the he/she gives you write permission on these files however, otherwise you will drive them crazy making changes :)

• In the voh-lib.pl file you define a verification_string, a random string of characters used to verify that the qaarf.html and af.html files are authentic. You must copy this value into the line of these files in the value="" section. Otherwise attempts to answer questions will fail.

• You will want to install some server security on the profs and conf directories to prevent access to them from the web. We use the NCSA server's directory level access control, putting .htaccess files in these directories which require validated users. This will vary from web server to webserver.

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mjw // voh@chem.ucla.edu // Last revision: April 25, 1997