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      the remstats user
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  Live Data

  Remstats was written by
  Thomas Erskine at the
  CRC in Canada and now
  at SourceWorks.

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The remstats user

You must choose a userid to run the remstats processes under. By default, it will be the user remstats, but you'll have to create it manually, as I'm not going to risk damaging someone's /etc/passwd file. Many operating-systems have a script called useradd or adduser or some variant on that.

NOTE: Don't run the remstats programs except as the remstats users. Many of the programs write extra files you won't know about unless you read the source, and when you do run them as the remstats user, it won't be able to modify the files that were created by the other user. This will probably cause the program to die, with a meaningful error message I hope, and you'll have to modify the owner by hand, as root. If you need to do this, go back to the source directory and do:

	% su - 'make install-owner'

The remstats user must be able to write files within the remstats directory trees rooted at /var/lib/remstats, /var/lib/remstats/data and /var/lib/remstats/cgi. The collection/update processes will also create files under /var/lib/remstats/tmp and /var/lib/remstats/data. The pagemakers write files under /var/lib/remstats/cgi. It's simplest to have all the remstats files and directories(except multiping and traceroute) owned by the remstats user.

You must also ensure that the CGI scripts (and almost every web-page remstats creates is a CGI script) get run by the remstats user. The CGI scripts read files under /var/lib/remstats/data and /var/lib/remstats/datapage. (See also the web-server installation.

There is a recently added feature in configure which permits you to specify a webgroup, which is the group the web-server runs as. If you are using this feature, you need to add the remstats user to the webgroup group and logout and back in so that the remstats user has access to this group to chgroup appropriate directory trees, primarily images, that get written as the web-server.


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Last updated Sun Apr 3 12:05:20 UTC 2005 by <terskine@users.sourceforge.net>.