Welcome to VOH, the Virtual Office Hours web package. Matthew Walker 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 1) Get the tar file. (You've already done this :)) 2) 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_1.1.tar 3) 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 4) 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... 5) Edit your voh.conf file in the conf directory. Instructions for this can be found in the docs directory. 6) 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. 7) Edit your voh.conf file. It normally resides in /conf. This file should have one line per class. See the README.voh.conf file in the docs directory. Note: This file must be readable by the server. I usually do this (in UNIX) by setting the file permissions 640 and chgrp'ing it to the server's group (as above). 8) 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 The VOH_setup script _should_ automatically change the permissions and group ownership of each classes' announcements.html, qa.html files and questions directory. If it fails to do this you will not be able to submit questions. 9) 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 10) 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. 11) 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 :) 12) 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. 13) 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. That's it. Matt Walker April 25, 1997